LSE occupiers call for free education

 by New Worker correspondent

AROUND 300 people took part in a march through the campus of London School of Economics (LSE) on Thursday 19th March, in support of a student occupation there of a room in the LSE’s Old Building.

The students are campaigning for free higher education and lobbying the Government to scrap tuition fees.

They are also opposing counter-terror legislation, calling for an end to zero-hours contracts for university staff and for a boycott of companies that profit from trade with Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

The students marched through the campus and then held a sit-down protest outside the Royal College of Surgeons, where cleaners in the Unison union have been campaigning over pay.

The cleaners, who are mainly migrants, had joined the march with their Unison banner. And one of them spoke at the protest.

News round-up

 Barking & Dagenham bin strike

  

STRIKING refuse collectors in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham are planning strike action on 18th, 19th and 20th March with a further two days on 7th and 8th April over a £1,000 pay cut for refuse drivers.

An overwhelming 75 per cent of the local community support the decision of members to take strike action to defend their wages says their union, GMB.

Keith Williams, GMB Senior Organiser said “Local residents were asked to respond to an independent online survey conducted by the Barking & Dagenham Post on Barking & Dagenham Council’s decision to cut pay of refuse/ cleansing drivers by £1,000 a year.

“An overwhelming 75 per cent of the local community support the decision of GMB members to take strike action to defend their wages.

“The residents have spoken and this shows the high esteem that they hold for the council employees who do such a valuable role in the community where they all live and serve.

“The Council should now listen to the public and do the right thing and reverse their arbitrary decision to cut the wages of GMB members by £1,000.”

 Domestic workers fight modern slavery

DOMESTIC workers donning suffragette costume staged a demonstration outside Parliament on Tuesday 17th March as MPs debated the crunch amendment to the Modern Slavery Bill, which reinstates the right of domestic workers to change employers.

Migrant Domestic Workers, part of Justice 4 Domestic Workers (J4DW) and the giant union Unite, as well as Kalayaan and Anti-Slavery International opposed the introduction of the tied visa system three years ago, which ties migrant domestic workers to their employer – a “form of modern day slavery”.

The tied visa system means migrant domestic workers are more fearful, more vulnerable to exploitation, and their right to legal redress has effectively been taken away, along with their status as a worker in their own right recognition so hard-fought for over decades and won from the Labour party with cross-party support in 1998.

But the House of Lords last month passed an amendment to the Modern Slavery bill which now allows domestic workers to change employers once in Britain and renew their visas, if in work.

 

Met chief wants CCTV in every home

METROPOLITAN Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan Howe has called on all householders and businesses to install CCTV cameras in their homes and premises to help the police catch burglars.

He has even suggested the cameras be set at head height rather than higher up because pictures of tops of heads are not so good at capturing facial identities.

Civil rights campaigners are alarmed that this could be the final step towards the dystopian society portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984. And although the cameras would be there ostensibly to catch illegal intruders, they could also be used to monitor people in their own homes.

Hogan-Howe said in an interview with LBC radio that civilians should set up closed-circuit television (CCTV) in their homes to aid police by giving footage to match the 12 million images of criminal suspects and offenders the city has on record.

Hogan-Howe explained. “Taking the tops of their heads is not that helpful for facial recognition which relies on the eyes and the configuration of the area around the nose and the mouth. So we're trying to get people to, ideally, add a camera at face level.

“If anyone listening has a business, think about installing a new one; they're relatively cheap.”

Meanwhile David Cameron has expressed his intention to ban communication services like Snapchat, WhatsApp and iMessage if they continue to be encrypted from the security services. Under new surveillance plans private CCTV is completely unregulated.

Recommending greater use of CCTV to gather more images of people's faces “often innocent people’s faces” undermines the security of each and every one of us said Renate Samson of the pressure group Big Brother Watch.

Labour Party MP and committee chair Andrew Miller, speaking to a House of Commons committee, said: “We were alarmed to discover that the police have begun uploading custody photographs of people to the police national database and using facial recognition software without any regulatory oversight. Some of the people had not even been charged.”

Aylesbury occupiers seize 12-storey block

MORE than 150 campaigners for better housing met in Burgess Park by the Old Kent Road in south London on Saturday 14th March to defy local council plans to tear down the huge, now emptied Aylesbury estate and replace it with luxury flats way beyond what the people who once lived there can afford.

Their action followed a protest march at the end of January demanding more affordable housing for local people, a cap on rents and an end to the privatisation of council-owned land.

After that demonstration a large group of protesters went to the Aylesbury estate, now boarded up but not too securely, and occupied a block of flats.

Police came to remove them that day but seeing them securely settled decided they did not have the resources to remove the squatters then and there and left them.

The council brought in private security guards to secure the whole of what is left of the estate — although there are still some tenants living there.

On 17th February the squatters were evicted from the original squat and there were six arrests. But others went on to squat new territory.

Earlier this month Southwark Council obtained an Interim Possession Order for 69-76 Chartridge on the Aylesbury Estate. It became illegal for anyone to trespass” in the eight occupied flats.

The squatters responded, in their own words: “Rather than wait for the police to evict us from our second occupied block, 69-76 Chartridge, we took the initiative, and moved into another empty nearby earlier this week.

“We are now in occupation of the disused council offices at the base of Chiltern House, at the corner of Portland Street and Albany Road.

“We have spent the past few days cleaning the place up, and trying to fix some of the disrepair and damage it’s suffered since the Property and Regeneration Departments moved to their new offices, over five years ago.

“We’ve already held a few events at our new space, and hope to organise more over the next couple of weeks. Keep checking the website for news, and details of film screenings, meetings, music and more.”

After meeting in Burgess Park, the activists marched through local shopping centres at the Elephant and Castle and the Walworth Road where they were well received by local people.

Then they went around the part of the estate scheduled for the next wave of demolition, which has now been turned into a camp-like fortress of wooden and metal fences, topped with anti-climb “curly wurly” — rotating sharp steel

All gates to the estate have been sealed and are guarded by security guards, including the dog patrols. The remaining residents have to ask these hired thugs permission to come in and out, and are ordered to walk round the estate to the “main entrance”. Visitors are checked off against a list of official inhabitants.

“If Southwark Council scumbags were looking for a way to piss their tenants off even more, they found it,” said the squatters. “During the demo there were even more security than usual in the last days, a few dozen altogether at the various entrances and in reserve. And they were backed up with more bodies from the Metropolitan Police.

“Despite all these heavies, we managed to open and push our way in through two gates. It was a bit of a scrum for half an hour or so, as gates were pushed back and forth, some metal strips torn off, and whole fence panels nearly flew off their hinges. In the end they just couldn’t stop us, and in rushed the crowd.

“As we reached the occupation in Chiltern House, massive banners were unfurled from high up in the 12 storey block. The comrades inside had taken the whole building, expanding from the ground floor former council offices to occupy a number of flats.”

The occupation posted a statement on its website last weekend, after the march opposing the demolition of the estate:

“We occupied residential flats above the ex- council regeneration and planning offices in Chiltern House. Rather than waiting to be evicted from our occupation in the offices, we took the initiative and expanded.

“The Aylesbury will not sit empty, waiting for demolition. We who have need of it will make use of it. We won’t wait in vain for the council to change their policies. We will take control of housing conditions ourselves.”

They added on social media: “Loads of beautiful flats occupied today! Come and take one!”

Karl Marx Remembered

At the Party Centre...

by New Worker  correspondent

Comrades and friends returned to the New Communist Party’s London Centre on Saturday to recall the outstanding achievements of Karl Marx.

            Marx spent most of his active life in Britain working with Frederick Engels building the international working class movement and writing a corpus of books that provides the basis for scientific socialism.

Andy Brooks and Alex Kempshall on the night

Throughout the world communists and progressives commemorate the immense contribution to the socialist movement on the anniversary of his death on 14^th March 1883. And this was reflected in the tributes from a large spectrum of the communist movement in Britain at the NCP’s annual reception in honour of the Marx and the philosophical thinking that inspired the great revolutionary movements of the 20th century.

The print shop was once again transformed for the bar and buffet and comrades and friends gathered in the main meeting room for the formal part of the celebrations that was opened by National chair Alex Kempshall.

NCP leader Andy Brooks, Michael Chant from the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (ML) and John McLeod of the Socialist Labour Party all paid tribute to Marx, whose entire life was dedicated to the struggle of the working class. Andy Brooks pointed out that Marx wasn’t the first to call for the emancipation of the working class, nor was he the first socialist. His greatest contribution to humanity was in devising the framework for scientific socialism, which has provided the working class with a powerful ideological and theoretical weapon of liberation struggle.

The Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels in 1848, is as valid today as it was on the day that it was written and the torch that it lit led to the raising of the Red Flag in Russia in October 1917 and the establishment of the international communist movement that ended the First World War and defeated the Nazis in the Second. No more so than in Democratic Korea that, together with Cuba, stands on the front-line against imperialism today.

Thae Yongho from the London embassy of the DPR Korea highlighted the importance of Marxism in the development of Korean-style socialism and the Juche Idea while Dermot Hudson from the UK Korean Friendship Association thanked the NCP for its long-standing and consistent solidarity with the Korean revolution. Marx was a practical revolutionary who worked to unite the socialist movement in Britain. He was also an internationalist who called on workers of all countries to unite – points stressed by comrade from the Communist Party of Greece and Marie Lynam from the Posadist movement and taken up by other comrades during the informal discussion that continued late long at the bar.

No NCP event can ever end without a collection for the New Worker and Daphne Liddle from the Politburo of the NCP made the call for the money crucial to ensure the survival of the New Worker. The comrades responded by raising £294 for the fighting fund.

...By Marx’s Tomb

By New Worker correspondent

Karl Marx died in his study at half-past two on the afternoon of Wednesday 14^th March 1883. He was buried three days later at Highgate Cemetery. To commemorate his passing the Marx Memorial Library has for many decades held an annual graveside oration at his burial place in the cemetery in North London. The Marx Memorial Library is the trustee of the Marx monument in the cemetery where over a hundred comrades gathered around the tomb on Sunday to celebrate the life-time achievements of the founder of scientific socialism.

The event was organised by the committee of the Marx Memorial Library, and conducted by Library chair Alex Gordon, a former president of the RMT transport union, who welcomed everyone to the commemoration and introduced the speakers.

Prof Emilianov, Jean Turner and Alex Gordon at the tomb

This year the graveside oration was given by Yuri Emilianov, a Soviet academician and a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and Jean Turner of the Communist Party of Britain.

New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks laid the NCP’s floral tribute at the tomb together with a procession of other communist representatives that included diplomats from the Vietnamese embassy  and comrades from Venezuela, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE),  the Progressive Party of Working People of Cyprus (AKEL), the Communist Party of Italy’s British Pietro Secchia branch and many more from other workers’ parties in the Middle East and the rest of the world that have members studying or working in Britain.

Finally the Internationale was sung around the monument bedecked with dozens of wreathes and floral tributes. The comrades then departed – some to a reception at a nearby public house while others went to hear Professor Emelianov give a talk on the  defeat of fascism in 1945 and its significance today at the Marx Memorial Library in the evening.