Tag: human-rights

Shame of Enforced Extradition from UK

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

This week’s comment from me in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.4.24), hopefully timely in terms of this being the day when the Rwanda Bill becomes a law-defying law, and at least 6 people are drowned trying to reach Britain from France in small boats confronted by French coastguards. Until there is safe passage, there is no justice.

The law of forced extradition will come into play this week. In the next 12 weeks, a chosen handful, against their will and agency, may be taken to a place of departure by armed guards, and transported by plane to a country they have no links to and no rights within.

Rwanda has a recent record of human rights abuses. 

Five years ago the Rwandan police opened fire on refugees protesting. Rwandan security forces shot dead at least 12 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo when they protested against a cut to food rations.

Authorities arrested and prosecuted over 60 of them on charges including “spreading false information with intent to create a hostile international opinion against the Rwandan state”. These same laws could be used against the people Britain now wants to pluck from south coast beaches and dump in Africa.

On 15th January this year, documents sent to MPs by home secretary James Cleverly admitted that “While Rwanda is now a relatively peaceful country, there are nevertheless issues with its human rights record around political opposition to the current regime, dissent and free speech.”

Absurdly, Four Rwandan asylum seekers were granted refugee status in the UK last year over “well-founded” fears of persecution. Rwanda is not a safe refuge.

Indeed, polls posted by Al Jazeera show widespread concern inside Rwanda about the refugees and the Treaty with Britain. The Rwandan economy is in crisis, there is mass unemployment and no jobs, and a housing crisis similar to that of the UK. 

Rwanda has not implemented all the promises it made in the Treaty with the British State, which has so far cost the tax-payer £340million, with estimates of the numbers of refugees likely to be extradited reaching a cost of over £1,500,000 per person.

The new Act breaks many other laws governing law-making! It prevents courts from considering laws which protect human rights and the safety of individuals. It is a law of political imposition, overriding justice, that is the hallmark of a totalitarian state.

The only rational way to understand this despicable law is as a part of a wider intensification of the racist ‘hostile environment’, openly admitted to and quoted by the previous Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who now criticises the Rwanda Act as too soft!

Given that the Rwanda Law makes no sense, it can only be understood as a racist law forced through by a racist government. It is an ideological pledge to a small core-group of ultra nationalist white supremacists who will salivate over the public execution of punishments for those seeking refuge. It is not the trafficking gangs who will be exposed or deposed. After all, we live in a Free Market economy which values and celebrates entrepreneurs!

Clearly, the racists want us to blame refugees for all the ills of Britain today. Whilst the far-Right criticise social conditions in Britain they do not support State intervention and taxation to eradicate poverty. They may also attack the Establishment’s intelligentsia, but they support unbridled Capitalism. This is why the scapegoating of “outsiders”, “The Other” is their primary target, their violent hatred as seen at various hostels and hotels focussed upon migrants they deem “illegal”.

Their dominant theme seeks to prevent and make invisible the real causes of the destruction of our country’s welfare state and infrastructure, which is causing misery for millions of UK citizens. 

The scale of deprivation and poverty here is far too great to be possibly caused by the numbers of asylum seekers arriving by flimsy boats or lorry chassis. 

The cost to the country of corrupt deals, tax-evasion by and unconscionable tax-handouts to the super-rich outweighs the cost of refuge 10,000,000-1. 

Shell and BP profits at over £40billion, paying less than 10% in tax despite the average worker here returning a total of nearly 40% of earnings in taxation. British Gas increased its surplus 10-fold whilst millions of us ration our heating due to fuel poverty. 

Tesco made £1.5billion profit from charging inflated prices for food whilst 2 million of us are reliant upon charitable food banks, 4 million UK children suffering poverty.

The water industries paid out £70bn to shareholders whilst overseeing degradation to a point of sewage pollution in every one of our rivers.

None of this is caused by refugees and asylum seekers, how could it be? None of these refugees are CEOs or shareholders. They have nothing. Yet the working class are told to blame and indeed hate them rather than the inhuman billionaires whose private wealth has increased by nearly 50% since 2020 by exploiting us. 

No human being can be deemed “illegal” – we are each subject to the lottery of being born somewhere unchosen. Only behaviours can be described as illegal according to law, and seeking to live isn’t a felony. Becoming super-rich off the backs of the poor is certainly a a crime, or should be.

The Rwanda Act must be repealed as part of a complete turn-around of our priorities and policies. Tax the Corporate Rich, put the welfare of all first and foremost, and ensure safe passage. Refugees are Welcome Here!

The Right To Strike is Worth Fighting For!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

After a break, my weekly Comment published in the daily Plymouth Herald on 26th January 2024 offered an advert for the national demonstration called by Britain’s national trade union federation, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), on the following Saturday. There had been little advertising either inside the trade union movement or the national media, despite the issue. The government has passed new legislation effectively banning strike action. Public services, including education, transport and health care are subject to legal prosecution where any strike action does not maintain “minimum service levels, for example, 40% of train service or 80% of health care. It renders redundant the power of the strike action. What would be the point? This is easily the harshest anti-union law since the time of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980’s. Nevertheless, this has been the TUC’s only action on the issue. The demonstration widened a local demonstration originally called to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the campaign for recognition of trade unions at the GCHQ spy headquarters in Cheltenham (the most conservative and heavily vetted of all civil service staff), so that the national trade union bureaucracy could be seen to have “done something” whilst doing the least possible. In the end, over 5,000 activists marched proudly despite the poor organisation, and friendly reports also included the non-plussed but supportive comments of by-standers who couldn’t work out what the march was for. The spineless and weak response of the national leadership to this terrible attack on basic human rights should be a cause for outrage.

Tens of thousands of trade unionists will be marching in Cheltenham this Saturday. We are outraged. The cause should be of deep concern to all, even if hardly mentioned in the mainstream media. 

The UK’s Government for the Bosses has created a law that can force people to work against their will. The introduction of the Minimum Service Levels Act effectively undermines the “Right to Strike” – the right to withdraw our labour in collective pursuit of decent pay and treatment at work. 

Workers, such as train drivers or nurses, can be forced by law to go into work whilst being trade union members called into strike action. To defy the Law is to face immediate dismissal and potential prosecution.

To be forced into work is nothing less than slavery. More importantly, it is the end of the democratic human right be a member of trade union. 

After at least fifteen laws restricting and threatening trade union organisation made by successive Conservative governments from the 1980’s onwards, this is the most authoritarian and undemocratic of them all.

Little wonder that the Labour Party has promised to repeal the Act should it become the next government, but we are sceptical unless huge pressure is exhibited by mass protest from below – Blair and Brown did not repeal even one of Thatcher’s anti-union laws.

Indeed, Tony Blair boasted that Britain has the most strict employment laws limiting strike action anywhere across Western Europe. 

Nevertheless, in the wake of last year’s largest levels of strike action in 30 years, strikes continue.

Last week’s national strike by doctors was the longest in the history of the NHS, and more is planned. Doctors have lost over 25% of real pay in the last decade, the majority earning less than tradespeople. They are also profoundly angered by the dilapidation of the NHS they observe everyday.

Next week the train driver’s union, ASLEF, begins the next round of rail strikes, fighting not only for an inflation-rate of pay rise but also against plans for unsafe working conditions. Under this new law, the union is to be held responsible for ensuring a minimum 40% of services are maintained, neutering almost all impact of strike action. 

Teachers in schools and colleges are once again considering strike action, the conditions of our education system quite the worst in three generations. 

All these workers and more are identified by the new law and can be forced into work, all their collective power undermined by maintaining minimum services. Rather than protect the sick, the students’ quality of education or the travelling public, this new Law will simply create even more chaos and disruption. It has to be challenged and defied. 

The attacks on working class conditions and our right to collective organisation are being ramped-up in front of the General Election, asking the question, “which side are you on?”. 

What power have we as workers got, except to join together and stand in defiance of exploitation, oppression and injustice? The right to strike is immutable, and worth fighting for. 

The Trades Union Congress has called the demonstration in Cheltenham in recognition of the 40th Anniversary of the GCHQ strikes against the banning of trade union organisation in that government security agency. Workers were bribed into non-union status and those who refused, sacked. Their union rights were restored in 1997 after a long campaign. 

The lesson must be that we have to fight to win, not only by marching in our thousands on Saturday but taking the fight to the heart of government, by refusing to abide by this unjust law. 

Coaches from Plymouth are organised by the Unite trade union and others. Contact your union for a seat now, and join a union wherever you work.