International Workers' Day

A May Day demonstration in Vladivostok, 1917

Today is May Day - or, as socialists know it, International Workers' Day!

Today, across the world, socialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists and progressives of all stripes will come out onto the streets to celebrate workers, the labour movement and the working class. On this day, we celebrate the contribution of ordinary men and women to our society, the history of ordinary people's struggles and the ongoing class war that engulfs our island, our country and our world.

It's worth knowing a little about how May Day actually originated. The whole thing started in Chicago, on May 4th 1886, when a confrontation between demonstrating workers and police officers came to a head. Chicago in 1886 was a city that exemplified the contradictions of Gilded Age capitalism - the city was home to tens of thousands of migrant workers, working a 60-hour week in terrible conditions and earning about $1.50/day for their trouble. The city was a hotbed of labour unrest - immediately before the incident on May 4th, it's estimated that 30,000-40,000 Chicagoans were on strike. Their demands? An eight-hour day - a rallying cry that had been taken up by hundreds of thousands of striking workers across the USA in a series of strikes in New York, Milwaukee, Detroit and many other cities.

On May 3rd, 1886, an incident occurred at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company factory in Chicago. The plant's Irish-American workforce had gathered outside the building to demand an eight-hour day and protest the lockout of union officials from the premises, while the plant's owners had sent in strikebreakers to cross the picket lines. Although around half of the strikebreakers had defected to the side of the striking workers, the remainder continued to go to work - protected by a group of 400 armed police officers. As the day progressed, tensions boiled over - as the strikebreakers left the factory at the end of the day, a group of strikers attempted to confront them.

At this point, the police fired upon the crowd of striking workers. Two strikers died in the ensuing chaos.

Local organizers, particularly the local anarchist movement, seized on this massacre as a way to promote a rally the next day in Haymarket Square in the Fulton River district, and distributed fliers across the city that called the workers of Chicago to arms. Despite predictions from the police that the anarchists intended to start a riot, the gathering was initially so peaceful that the Mayor, who was observing the meeting, went home early.

At 10:30 PM, as British socialist Sam Fielden was finishing his speech, a large number of police advanced on the gathering and ordered that Fielden stop speaking and the meeting disperse immediately - Fielden's rhetoric had been more radical than that of the previous speakers. As the police advanced on the workers, someone - and, to this day, we have no idea who - threw a fragment bomb into the path of the advancing coppers. One policeman was killed immediately, and the police fired upon the crowd in response - the crowd, for their part, ran for their lives. Several of the workers were armed and shot back, but most of the 60+ police officers wounded in the shooting were shot by other police officers in the chaos.

Seven policemen died - it's unknown how many workers were killed by the police.

In the ensuing red scare, countless suspected anarchists and communists were subjected to mass arrests, illegal searches, spying and harassment by the police in Chicago. Eight men were put on trial for the bombing - although the evidence clearly proved none of the eight had thrown the bomb, they were all found guilty and all but one were sentenced to death. Two had their sentences commuted to life in prison, one committed suicide rather than face the rope, and the remaining for were hanged by the neck until they were dead.

August Spies, one of the four who were hanged, famously said that "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."

The trial was soon exposed for the sham it was, and Spies and his comrades were rehabilitated in the public eye as martyrs - political prisoners, condemned to death for a crime they obviously didn't commit. The Knights of Labour, a major union fighting for an eight-hour day, doubled its membership in the months after the riot, and, in 1890, the American Federation of Labour officially named May the 1st as the day for the commemoration of the Haymarket riot.

August Spies

In 1891, the Second International - the international union of socialist and communist parties and organizations - officially recognized May 1st as International Workers' Day.

In the socialist bloc countries before and during the Cold War, May Day became an extremely important public holiday. In 1917, the Bolshevik government in the Russian SFSR recognized May Day as a public holiday, and this tradition was followed by all the other countries of the socialist bloc. In the USSR, it was often a day for massive military parades, showcasing the might of Soviet power as a counterbalance to imperialism - in the post-Cold War era, it's become a rallying point for radicals, particularly in the former East Germany and former USSR. Even outside the former socialist bloc, most countries recognise May Day as "Labour Day", "International Workers' Day" or some derivative thereof.

Remember - take it easy this International Workers' Day.

Workers built the world - why shouldn't they own it?

Industrial-scale pollution - a damning indictment of Jersey's environmental policy

It's not often that you learn that your borehole water might be poisoned from the front page of the local rag.

Even the most slack-jawed, braindead apologist for the government's appalling record on environmental issues will admit that this hasn't exactly been a fantastic week for the government's environmental PR. On Monday, the rag's front page carried a story entitled "PFOS chemical pollution investigation intensifies", which provided all of us lucky enough to live in areas which aren't on mains drains (yes, there are places in one of the richest places in Europe, in the year of our Lord 2019, that are not connected to the mains drains network) with the news that we might be drinking carcinogenic fire retardant. The stuff in question - perfluorooctane sulphonate, or PFOS - is something about which concerns have been raised before (according to the rag, as far back as the '90s), including a nice little incident back in February where it was found that boreholes in St. Peter still contained traces of this stuff from back when it was used to put out a burning plane after a crash in 1980.

That's almost 40 years ago, and this chemical - that causes cancer - is still in the water.

This week, tests in a stream near the airport revealed a PFOS level of 1.2400μg/l - once again, above safe levels.

But, don't worry, borehole users - the Environment Department has knocked up some new guidelines to ensure we can stay safe! According to the rag's report, they assert that, er, "pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under five should not drink borehole water unless it is known exactly what it contains".

I shouldn't need to explain that it really isn't acceptable for certain water sources to be undrinkable for pregnant women and children under five, in the richest place in Britain, in the 21st century. We're literally sending aid workers to end this sort of thing in the External Relation's minister's pet projects in Rwanda, yet we cannot even solve the problem of polluted water in our own backyard. It really is astonishing, and a damning indictment of the utter carelessness that the States continues to show with borehole users. It isn't just the States, either. Certain farmers in the bay have developed a bit of a reputation for pumping their fields full of certain chemicals, some of which can also be seriously harmful if they get into people's drinking water. The fact that there aren't regulations to prevent this, in this day and age, utterly baffles me.

I suppose it could be worse - we could be talking about the levels of pollution at the Waterfront, as revealed on today's front page! If you thought carcinogenic water was bad, wait until you hear this.

According to tests conducted by Earth Project Jersey, the water at the Waterfront is (significantly) more contaminated with heavy metals than water from the port of Jinzhou in northeast China, a city whose major industries include, er, petrochemistry and industrial-scale metallurgy. That's right, folks, our ordinary seawater at the Waterfront is more polluted than the water from Chinese heavy industry.

Considering how common it is for people to mock the Chinese for wearing anti-pollution gear such as smog masks, this sort of thing really should give some people pause for thought. We have no heavy industry - in fact, we scarcely have any industry at all - and yet our water is significantly more polluted than a Chinese petrochemical and metallurgical manufacturing hub. Why? Because luxury flats are being treated as more important than seawater which doesn't slowly and painfully kill invertebrates and fish - because the government would rather appease rich, foreign investors than protect our environment.

It's positively Dickensian.

Oh, well. At least town pledged to become carbon-neutral, right?

EDIT 16:14PM 07/04/19:

It was reported in yesterday's rag that the findings about the water at the Waterfront were incorrectly provided to the paper by a scientist who had done his maths wrong, and thus don't actually reflect the concentration of heavy metals at the Waterfront. We are not, in fact, more polluting than Chinese heavy industry, thank god.

However, the same report carried a statement from a construction industry spin doctor, saying that the concentrations of metals in the water HAVE increased. He then goes on to play this off as temporary and therefore not of concern, but I'd question the wisdom of that sort of thinking. You can never be too careful - and, in any case, your construction site should not be releasing pollution into the water, full stop.

Monty's been suspended!

Are you an irritating and conservative obstructionist bent on defying your employer?

Do you think that people suffering extreme pain should grin and bear it, in order that you don't have to sacrifice your principles?

Do you just really hate your patients?

Well, the hospital may soon be looking for a new leading pain specialist, and methinks it sounds like just the job for you?

This week in Jersey politics, our culture minister has been suspended for the heinous crime of emailing a few States members, calling for a pain specialist at the hospital who refuses on principle to prescribe medicinal cannabis to be sacked.

I think we all know that he's essentially correct (if a little crass), and that someone who hoards drugs away from their patients based upon moral principles rather than empirical evidence would be better placed in the hospital's chapel, rather than its pain clinic. However, what really interests me about this case is the justification that JLF and his cronies have given for Monty's sacking, which is a paragraph in the ministerial code that gives ministers a "duty" to uphold the political impartiality of civil servants and "should act with courtesy and respect at all times towards officers".

Do we really think that setting a precedent, where ministers can be sacked for suggesting a civil servant may not be of the highest possible calibre, is really a good idea?

I support our civil servants, and I think the way they've been treated recently is appalling. However, it is a fact of life, inevitable in any government of any size, that some civil servants will be bad at their jobs, will be corrupt, will be pursuing political agendas of various sizes and scopes. We're told we live in a democracy - our elected representatives, whatever you might think of them, have a right to hold these unelected civil servants to account and ensure they're executing the government's will properly. Sometimes, that means asking awkward questions and saying things that might ruffle a few feathers - but that's part and parcel of representative democracy, if that's what you believe in.

(I can't say I do, but that's by the by.)

We've got to be honest about the failings of our civil servants, just as we've got to be honest about the way they're treated by the States Employment Board and other bodies. If we can't criticise, if we can't point out flaws, if ministers can't ask difficult questions and say difficult things, then the agenda is not being set by the politicians, but by the bureaucrats, and that isn't democracy.

Otherwise, this island is nothing more than a bureaucratic dictatorship.

Independence and the finance industry - time for a REAL discussion

"They're planning on doing what?"

What's even better than one finance industry stooge pissing himself?

That's right - two finance industry stooges pissing themselves!

You might say that British MPs Andrew Mitchell and Margaret Hodge have been getting a bit of criticism as of late for their plans to strongarm British crown dependencies and overseas territories into introducing public registers of beneficial ownership.

This has, of course, been done before - Mitchell and Hodge are veterans of the struggle against the organised, legalised system of mass theft that is the offshore financial system - but it comes at a time when Theresa May's zombie government, desperate to scrape up enough votes to pass their Brexit deal, will jump on any old wagon to buy a few more MPs to their cause.

In other words - it's for real this time.

This hasn't really gone down well in the halls of power.

Now, anyone can see that JLF, St Pier and co. are running scared, that they're desperate to knock up the sort of supposedly impenetrable constitutional argument that Jersey, Guernsey and other tax-avoidance hives of villainy have used for years, that it constitutes colonialism for the British state to interfere in the day-to-day affairs of crown dependencies. Anyone can also see that this is a bust-up between two sections of the same international capitalist class - one that anyone who is both an anti-imperialist and an anti-capitalist has no dog in - but the thing which has really wound me up with the discussion around all this is the whisperings of "independence".

I didn't used to believe in Jersey independence - I didn't used to identify myself as a nationalist, and I remain somewhat skeptical about movements towards independence while we remain within a capitalist system. James Connolly famously once said that "If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs." - English imperialism is more than political influence and the occasional bit of "advice" from our friends at the Home Office. However, I've always found the dialogue around independence whenever a tax crackdown is mooted to be incredibly insulting and offensive. It's like we've been so co-opted by international capital, so "Anglo-Saxon-ised", that the only point at which we'd consider asserting ourselves is if our ability to get away with robbing the British taxpayer blind was potentially compromised. 

Jersey is so, so much more than the finance industry. We have our own language, our own culture - we form a nation, albeit one without a nation-state. We have a different climate, a different way of thinking about things, a different way of doing things - we aren't English, and we never will be. I was never attracted to Jèrriais nationalism on economic grounds - it's about who we are, what this island represents. 

Too often, the arguments for and against independence are reduced to "muh finance industry". Rubbish! As the 21st century matures, Jèrriais grows, and the finance industry inevitably declines, the discussion about independence is something we're going to have to have at one point or another. That discussion, when we do have it, has to be of substance, it has to mean something - it cannot be "it's the economy, stupid". 

Jersey has enough problems with internalised racism as it is. We are already a cog in the death machine that is international finance - our language is already on life support. 

We do not need to debase the discussion about asserting ourselves as a nation by worrying about what international capitalists think.

Rental caps petition - last push!

Just a quick one for today.

Most of you will already have been aware of or attended the rally for public sector pay, held today in the Royal Square. The place was packed - cracking speeches were given, witty banners were held high, and Reichsführer Parker received his requisite boo. One story particularly stuck out - a Unite rep detailed the struggle of a woman he'd met in Jersey who was working three jobs and still failing to make ends meet, with her landlord hoovering up most of her income (leaving her with only £600/month to live on).

Obviously, she isn't the only one - astronomically high rents are a massive issue in Jersey. You might remember that a few months back, islander Jan McAllister started a petition on petitions.gov.je for a law to cap private sector rents. She got a ministerial response in September, full of all the usual waffle they give petitions which reach the requisite threshold (1000 signatures), but now her petition is approaching 5000 signatures - enough to trigger a debate on the issue in the States Assembly.

Her petition also expires on Thursday.

Please, please, please, if you haven't already, take ten seconds out of your day and sign Jan's petition here:

https://petitions.gov.je/petitions/200077

By-election watch: Nominations night

That's right, folks, it's the 29th of January, 2019, and it's nominations day for the town by-election that's set to fill the seat previously held by the dearly departed Richard Rondel.

In the time since my last by-election post, the number of candidates has jumped from three to nine. We've got some arrogant no-hopers, some semi-decent progressives, and an accomplice to occupation and cultural genocide. Let's take a look.

First off, we've got the three who were first to announce, who I covered in my previous post - Geraint Jennings, Andrea Mallett and Gordon Troy. Jennings is a Jèrriais activist and progressive vote-splitter, Mallett is a fairly harmless-looking festival organiser, and Troy is a standard, Shenton-Troy family, out-of-touch relic of the 1980s, when all you had to do to get rich in Jersey was take a job in a local bank and help hide the stolen hordes of African despots and international terrorists. Jennings and Troy have both ran and lost before - none of the three have a substantial chance of winning the seat. There's not much more to say on those three: if you're interested, you can check out a previous post which dealt with this lot in detail here.

Next up is the guy that local "cynical old man" act and Blairite agitator Andy Jones likes to refer to as "one half of JAG" - John Baker, the chairman of the principles-free pseudo-libertarian gang known as the Jersey Action Group. Having established a reputation for loud and incessant complaining at the Future Hospital project's community outreach sessions and aligned himself with such steadfast allies as former deputy and erstwhile night thief Sean Power, Baker has now decided to throw his hat into the ring and run for deputy, and there's a disturbingly high chance he'll end up getting it. I might disagree with Baker on a whole host of issues, but he isn't stupid, and him and Power have, via JAG, built up a fairly substantial movement of hospital obsessives, Jersey Lifeboat Association fellow travelers and whoever they can pick up with a fairly generic anti-Parker, "anti-establishment" (at least, that's how they see it) line. Jersey has a fairly heavy constituency of cranks, and an corresponding community of "bloke you could have a beer with" conmen - Baker is, for better or for worse, the latest manifestation thus.

Number five, and we've got disability campaigner Anthony Lewis. On the face of it, he seems like a nice bloke about whom there isn't much to say, and, before I looked into his manifesto, I really didn't have much of a frame of reference as to what he really stands for. It's less generic than I expected. His manifesto from May last year, when he stood for senator, supports the creation of a Minister for Equality, an Environment Department completely separated from Planning, investment in recycling, electric public transport, cycle paths and a requirement for all newly constructed homes to have solar panels. It goes without saying that he is but one guy, with no party or other political structure behind him to back him up and help him achieve all this, and he's certainly no revolutionary, but he's a man with the right spirit, and that's something I can respect.

Next on the list is business consultant and "executive coach" Inna Gardiner.

Hoo boy.

Gardiner is a former employee of the Israeli Ministry of Education in the occupied city of Jerusalem. Any leftist worth their salt should know that the entire Israeli state apparatus is a settler-colonial death machine which works tirelessly to systematically enslave, oppress and ultimately expel or exterminate the Palestinian people, and the Ministry of Education is no different. Schools in Israel's Palestinian bantustan (the Palestinian National Authority) are woefully underfunded, and so, never one to pass up an opportunity to extinguish Palestinian culture, the Ministry of Education offers Palestinian schools extra money out of Israel's education budget if they agree to teach the Israeli school curriculum. Faced with god-awful funding from the puppet government in Ramallah and young Palestinian school leavers who can't find employment in the Israeli jobs market (80% of Jerusalemite Palestinians live below the poverty line and only 40% are employed), schools sign on, leading to a bizarre and tragic situation where Palestinian teachers are teaching Palestinian kids to view the genocidal mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the land of Palestine during the Zionist invasion of 1948 as a valiant independence war for a haven for the much-persecuted Jews and Palestinian teenagers are doing exams on Israel's founding fathers and the history of Zionism. A culture that doesn't know its own history doesn't last very long - this policy, among many others, is simply one facet of the countless policies deployed by the Israeli government to grind down and destroy the Palestinian people.

Anyone who thought it was remotely acceptable to even engage with an organization and a government which engages in this kind of blatantly genocidal policy is deserving of far more than simply not receiving your vote. I'd advise anyone who even pretends to care about human rights and cultural preservation to refuse to touch her with a ten-foot pole.

Speaking of which, Nick le Cornu is standing again!

I genuinely admire Nick, and respect him for the consistent fighting for the rights of workers and for democratic reform that he's done over the past few decades. He's a committed socialist, the most radical of all the candidates, and he's regularly victimised by the state media and by the establishment-controlled courts because he asks all the right questions and doesn't give up easily. I've got no doubt that he'd be an absolutely class States member, and I'd love to actually endorse him.

However, he's also the candidate with the most established baggage, to the extent that it makes him kinda hard to support. Most people who know the name Nick le Cornu will be aware of the "Kristina Moore incident", a 2014 spat which saw NLC expelled from Reform Jersey after he accused Moore, the island's most popular politician in terms of number of votes, of faking cancer. Obviously, not a fantastic look, and NLC's decision to double down on it and claim he only lost the subsequent election due to a black hat establishment campaign to destroy his public image didn't make things much better. Obviously, he WAS the subject of a state media smear campaign - all progressive candidates are in Jersey - but that doesn't wash away the fact that he, to this day, refuses to really accept that accusing a cancer survivor of faking it wasn't very nice. The fact that, ever since the incident, he's been too proud to admit his errors and self-criticise makes him a pretty difficult candidate.

That said, nobody should ever be solely judged on one incident alone. Nick is a consistent anti-corruption, anti-oligarchy, anti-establishment campaigner who has fought for ordinary people for years and been treated like shit for it. If Reform Jersey aren't your bag, I'd say that le Cornu is your best bet.

Which, of course, brings us to Reform Jersey's candidate, Lyndsay Feltham. Full disclosure - I'd never heard of her before her candidacy was announced. From Reform's official communiques, she went to Le Rocquier and Hautlieu, she has a masters in Cultural and Media Studies, she's one of the few candidates who actually lives in the district and she's worked as a civil servant for 12 years, in Jersey and in Western Australia. I don't know her, and I can't vouch for either personality or principles, but, in Feltham's case, that isn't the point. The main thing which separates Lyndsay Feltham from every other candidate standing in this by-election is the fact that behind her is a political party, with a detailed 40-page manifesto, five members already in the States Assembly and a capacity to deliver which far outstrips any independent politician you care to name, and, at the end of the day, that's where this really matters. I like Geraint's consistent stand for the preservation of Jèrriais, I like NLC's commitment to a real socialist alternative, I like Ant Lewis' stauch environmentalism, but, when all is said and done, it's an indisputable fact that independent politicians with bright ideas don't tend to achieve much in the States, and usually end up either ground down and co-opted by the establishment or as a lone voice piping up from the back to speak to an establishment-dominated Assembly that doesn't take you seriously (that's you, Higgins). Anyone who reads this blog often will know full well that social democracy is hardly my cup of tea, but the revolutionary situation in these isles is hardly red-hot right now, and Reform are the only group who really have any capacity to change people's lives for the better.

With all that said, I can't exactly say I'm particularly hopeful for this by-election. With three broadly progressive candidates, and a host of others, it seems like the progressive vote will, as ever, be sliced and diced between three candidates, causing them all to fail and yet another reactionary voice to find their place on the Assembly's benches. Another day in the depressing meat grinder that is left-wing politics in Jersey, eh?

Time'll tell, I guess.

No magic money tree?

"Your average person in Jersey looks upon the island's political system, particularly over the past two weeks, as a total sham.... we are ruled by a government that is totally incompetent." - Deputy Montfort Tadier, 2008

"And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”" - Luke 23:34

We are ruled by idiots. 

A simplistic conclusion, perhaps, but one I've found myself increasingly unable to not draw after the events of this week in the long-running saga over public sector pay.  

On Monday, it was announced by public sector unions that they're going back on strike. Customs and Immigration officers won't be turning up on Monday morning, followed by civil servants on Tuesday. Teaching assistants will be walking out for two-and-a-half hours on Monday morning, and civil servants have been ordered to stop accepting paid overtime. No more pussy-footing around with two-hour walk-outs. 

On Tuesday, both nursing unions voted to reject the States' final offer, a derisory below-inflation rise of 3%. Threatening industrial action, the unions said that "nursing staff have had enough of being devalued", "there will be no staff for this building if the concerns of nursing staff are not addressed" and "there needs to be recognition that this includes their staff, who, having been continuously undervalued, have experienced an ongoing detrimental impact on both morale and mental health.". 

Ouch. 

On Wednesday, our esteemed Chief Minister reacted to the news that another batch of public sector workers had told him and Charlie where they could stick it by tossing out everyone's favourite Prime Minister's election spiel, saying that there's "no magic money tree" and that a pay rise for nurses that met the cost of living would mean that taxes would have to go up. Oh, the horror! Functioning public services, what kind of nerds have those? We literally don't have a corporate tax rate - ultra-rich "high value residents" are paying 1% on most of their yearly earnings, while the working and middle classes get squeezed and squeezed forever. Gosh, it's almost like we live in a tax haven which requires comprehensive tax reform!

On Thursday, our wonderful Connétable de Saint Ouën, Richard Buchanan, unconvincingly claimed that the States Employment Board doesn't feel "any pressure" to appoint a new chair, nearly a month after Tracey Vallois finally cracked and resigned her post as the head of the SEB. Yeah, no need to worry, lads, I'm sure it'll all work out fine. It's not like the board is going through its toughest period EVER, or anything like that. Don't you worry. Everything is OK. We're doing fine. Ignorance is strength. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. 

Obviously, this sort of rank idiocy in the face of crisis hasn't been well-received even by the armchair overseers of the Corporate Services Scrutiny Panel, who have summoned the Chief Minister to a hearing in order to discuss why Richard Buchanan is such an intransigent moron why the board responsible for overseeing the most live issue on the island's political scene right now hasn't actually got anyone to chair it. 

Also on Thursday, our friends the States FOI team published a lovely response to a question on the rolling monthly cost of Parker's interim directors, which you can read here. Total monthly cost, plus expenses: £389,600 a month. A report released the day before informed us that, for example, Anthony McKeever, the interim director of Health and Community Services, is pocketing £27K a month. 

No magic money tree, right?

Who actually signs this stuff off? Who can we hold responsible for deciding that £27K was anything near a remotely reasonable monthly cost for one bloke? 

It's beginning to feel like the rolling incompetence, poor attitudes and general lack of serious from the States over the last few months in relation to the civil service problem is starting to come to a head. They don't have any options left. John le Fondré is many things, but stupid isn't one of them, so he must realise that he doesn't have a way out of this. The strikes will go ahead next week, and then they'll get worse, and then they'll get really, really bad, and then government on this island will effectively cease to function, because the unions aren't playing around anymore. The government has no cards left to play - the argument that "there's no more money" has long been exposed as a fraud, and the government's negotiations with union officials ground to a screeching halt the moment the government declared their pay offer final. 

So, what's the plan, lads? What's the grand strategy?

Cave in to all of the unions' demands? 

Screech about how there's no money left until the end of time?

Or simply bugger off back to Angliétèrre and trouser all the cash?

Can't exactly say I'm keen to find out.