Sunday 26 April 2015

Update #59

Hello everyone,
Welcome to this week's update on the political happenings in Derby from the Socialist Workers Party!

Branch Meetings

The SWP is a party of activists who know that we need to understand the world to be effective in our actions. Our meetings have a discussion about key issues: economic, political, historical and cultural; as well as planning for events and activities.


Last week we had a fantastic discussion about the nature of the crisis. This week we look back at a hugely important event in working-class history: the matchwomen's strike of 1888, when some of the most exploited workers doing some of the most dangerous work in the country organised a successful fight for workers' rights. Join us - 7 pm, Thursday 30th April, West End Community Centre!


The following Thursday we will not be having a meeting due to the General Election. Future meetings will be announced soon - check this blog, sign up for our emails or follow us on Twitter to keep up to date!




View Larger Map

Derby Stand Up To UKIP activities


The Derby Against UKIP campaign's fortnightly stalls have been very successful in getting out literature to get out the truth about the populist, right-wing UKIPpers and their divisive homophobic, sexist, racist and anti-working class members and policies. Recent polls suggest that anti-UKIP campaigning is having a significant effect.


The election is not over yet, and if we want people to make the decision not to vote for this collection of malicious, pro-rich white men, anti-everyone else bunch we should continue to support the Derby Against UKIP campaign.

There will be leafleting of Alvaston on the 2nd May - please come and help out if you can!

If you're interested in finding out more, email sutuderby@gmail.com

Silk Mill Rally



We had a great day, despite some dodgy weather, on Saturday - see photos and read our report here:



Can't make our meetings?


If you want to find out more about us, meet some of our comrades, sign up to any of our petitions, find out about campaigns we are involved in, buy our paper or get hold of some of our other literature, why not come along to the campaign stall on Saturdays?

Find us on St Peter's St from 12 pm!

Silk Mill March and Rally 2015

Yesterday was the annual march and rally in the city centre to commemorate the 1834 Silk Mill lockout, a bitter industrial struggle which marks both one of the first strikes of the industrial age and the beginnings of what would become the trades union movement. It is recorded on a plaque at the Silk Mill museum, where every year the wreath is laid, and in a mural on the side of the Silk Mill pub. The Trades Council has recently published a book on working class history in Derby, in which the struggle is featured, and there was a film on at the QUAD in the afternoon all about the lockout.

 It's a big day for the left in the city, and trades unionists, political parties and activists were all out for the day. There were some good placards,

and a good crowd turned out ahead of the march
and we had a fairly prominent stall!

It wouldn't be a march without Socialist Worker placards, no matter what changes the weather went through in the space of a few minutes (bright sunshine, torrential downpour, sullen clemency, if you were wondering).




After the wreath-laying and march we had some speeches from trades unions including the FBU, Joginder Bains of the Indian Workers' Association, the TUC, the People's Assembly and Labour politicians including Derby North MP Chris Williamson and Council Leader Ranjit Banwait.

And after a bit of political theatre from the anti-TTIP campaign, the band led us in cheerful if fairly ragged renditions of wonderful workers' hymn to the struggle The Internationale, and boring old Labour dirge The Red Flag (views as to the merits of the Internationale and the Red Flag reflect the personal opinions of the author, and are not necessarily those of the SWP as a whole. Although clearly they should be. ;) ). All in all, a good day out for every worker and their family, and a good opportunity to raise the cause of anti-austerity, anti-TTIP politics!

Monday 20 April 2015

Update #58

Hello everyone,
Welcome to this week's update on the political happenings in Derby from the Socialist Workers Party!

Branch Meetings

The SWP is a party of activists who know that we need to understand the world to be effective in our actions. Our meetings have a discussion about key issues: economic, political, historical and cultural; as well as planning for events and activities.

We have now uploaded the text of our recent meeting on socialists and elections - link to the post.

We've had some great meetings over the last few weeks, and this Thursday's should be another good one: Marxist theory of crisis - the nature of the current long depression - what caused the crash, why can't capitalism recover and what can we expect in the near future? 23rd April, 7 pm, West End Community Centre.



The following week we look back at one of the most famous strikes in the working class movement - the matchwomen's strike of 1888. Thursday 30th April, 7 pm, West End Community Centre.


View Larger Map

Derby Stand Up To UKIP activities


The Derby Against UKIP campaign's fortnightly stalls have been very successful in getting out literature to get out the truth about the populist, right-wing UKIPpers and their divisive homophobic, sexist, racist and anti-working class members and policies. Recent polls suggest that anti-UKIP campaigning is having a significant effect.


The election is not over yet, and if we want people to make the decision not to vote for this collection of malicious, pro-rich white men, anti-everyone else bunch we should continue to support the Derby Against UKIP campaign.

There will be leafleting of Alvaston on the 2nd May - please come and help out if you can!

If you're interested in finding out more, email sutuderby@gmail.com

Silk Mill Rally



The annual Silk Mill march and rally, which commemorates the struggles of Derby's workers in one of the first industrial strikes the world has ever seen, is approaching. This will be on Saturday April 25th. It is a great opportunity to celebrate working class resistance and organisation, so join the march, organised by the Derby Trades Union Council and with the support of all the trades unions in the city!




Can't make our meetings?

Saturday's campaign stall was very lively, as it coincided with the Anti-TTIP day of action. Comrades from the SWP joined in with the anti-TTIP campaigners as well as holding our regular stall.

If you want to find out more about us, meet some of our comrades, sign up to any of our petitions, find out about campaigns we are involved in, buy our paper or get hold of some of our other literature, why not come along to the campaign stall on Saturdays?

Find us on St Peter's St from 12 pm!

TUSC Election Broadcast

Here is the party political broadcast from TUSC - The Trades Union and Socialist Coalition that was aired on Friday evening. Fantastic job.

To vote or not to vote: what should socialists say about elections?

Last week's meeting topic was the vote and elections. We had a great discussion - here's the introductory talk that kicked things off!


To vote or not to vote: what should socialists say about elections?

INTRODUCTION
Elections are a fraught subject for the left. Those to the left of us, the ultra-left, often reject bourgeois elections completely as a distraction or, worse, capitulation to capitalism. Those to our right often urge uncritical support for the Labour party during an election period as the only viable alternative to the Tories. This election is going to be one of the most important for a long time, because there are significant shifts occurring in the support for the established parties of the current political class, so the need for socialists to adopt the right strategy towards the ballot box is more urgent than ever.

If you read our paper, Socialist Worker, you may have seen our weekly 'Where We Stand' column, which tries to unambiguously set out the SWP's political purpose and strategy. We say:

The present system cannot be patched up - it has to be completely transformed. The structures of the parliament, army, police and judiciary cannot be taken over and used by the working people.

I stand by this – as a member of the SWP, as a revolutionary socialist, I cannot agree that parliament can deliver the democratic rule of our class. But because we are a serious revolutionary organisation, we cannot ignore elections either. For the majority of working people in this country, elections are seen as the main, or only, way to enact political change. We cannot afford to ignore them, or to pretend that it makes no difference whatever whether the Labour Party or the Tories are in office. We must be rooted in the class, and as long as workers have illusions in parliament we must play an active role in affecting the outcome of elections. The 'Where We Stand' column goes on to say:

Elections can be used to agitate for real improvements in people's lives and to expose the system we live under, but only the mass action of workers themselves can change the system.

In this speech I want to briefly examine the nature of elections in a capitalist society, the arguments of those to our left and those to our right, and recent debates within the SWP as to the correct strategy to adopt towards elections in general and the 2015 general election in particular.

THE VOTE

Almost 200 years ago, in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, when an armed group of middle-class men on horseback cut down hundreds of peacefully protesting and picnicking men women and children, the poet Shelley described the rule of the political class of Britain as 'anarchy'. He meant this not in its modern sense, but in the sense of a situation in which there was no law because the law was embodied in an autocratic and violent body of men. His poem, The Mask of Anarchy, describes a procession of Tory ministers who embody various manifestations of moral evil: 'I met Murder on the way - / He had a mask like Castlereagh'. Behind this procession of depravity follows Anarchy himself, who rode

On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown,
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW.'

Why were MPs able to rule in such a violent way? Why were the possessors of property able to cut down working people with impunity? Partly at least, it was because of what we would today call a 'democratic deficit' – that is to say that MPs were accountable to less than 5% of the country, and all of this electorate were members of the propertied classes. Much of the struggle for working people in the 19th century was for representation in the institutions of the ruling class – and these struggles were sometimes with, and sometimes against the struggles between members of the ruling class with different interests. On the day of the Peterloo massacre, for instance, the demonstration was part of the Chartist movement, which called for universal male suffrage and annually elected parliaments – radical demands which the bourgeoisie would suffer no more than the aristocracy. Yet little more than a decade later workers in Derby were forcing aristocrats to cower in their homes and burning down prisons over a parliamentary bill which would have given suffrage to only 10% of the country. In the case of the Great Reform Act, the ruling class were split, with the bourgeois Commons pushing for what the aristocratic Lords could not stomach. But the internal wranglings of the ruling class are useful to us for one purpose only – how far such crises can be used to further the interests of the working class. In Derby's case, although the workers may not have obtained suffrage, only a year after the Great Reform Act finally became law workers at the Silk Mill had the confidence to organise for one of the world's first industrial strikes, a conflict which lasted a year in its own right.

It is easy to forget that we have only had universal suffrage on an equal basis in this country for 85 years (the voting age for women was only lowered to that of men in 1930). It is a national myth that parliament is equal to democracy, when for almost its entire existence it has been open only to the privileged and election itself to the wealthy few (a property qualification has almost always been attached to the franchise). What has the ballot box achieved in the last 85 years? In some ways it has achieved a lot: national insurance, council housing, pensions, the NHS, universal free education, social services, taxes on the wealthy, Health & Safety, anti-discrimination laws, the Equal Pay Act. However, it has also scored victories for the ruling class – low corporate taxation, privatisation of public services, removal of capital controls, anti-trade union laws, lax enforcement of laws to protect workers, and of course, austerity, the set of policies enacted by a rhetoric of togetherness and belt-tightening but in reality aimed a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom of society to the top; at penalising and criminalising poverty. It has driven up suicide rates, impoverished the disabled and is being used to destroy public services like the NHS, social services and the NHS by deliberately understaffing them and changing the systems to make it impossible to work within them. Every advance has been won at a time when capital is comparatively weakened, but when the forces of capital are desperate they often strike out ferociously to protect their interests. In 1979 it was Thatcher, in 2008 it was Brown and 2010 it was Cameron. Attacks on workers' living standards have been ferocious, as capital seeks to restore the rate of profit without the destruction of capital accumulation that a crisis on the scale which we have seen requires.1 The vote has not protected workers from the class war being waged by capital.

One of the problems with the vote as it now stands is that it is within a framework created by the ruling class and it is designed to limit the participation of people in making the decisions that affect their lives. In fact it is limited to the election of people for long periods who may or may not do something that is in your interest. More fundamentally, elections take place within the context of a class-divided society, in which the interests of capital have a powerful voice through control of the mass media, lobbying and direct employment of political representatives (many MPs hold second, third or fourth jobs as directors of various companies, for example). So every five years every person in this country has an equal opportunity to elect someone who will spend every working day of the next five years subject to powerful social pressures to conform to the demands of capital.

This is not to say that working class interests have no influence on political representatives. Some Labour MPs, for example, are still sponsored by trades unions. But unions, because of their positions as arbitrators of disputes, seek to compromise with capital, not to destroy it. They want to improve the conditions of exploitation, not to remove the exploitation altogether. So the working class voices that affect these representatives are unlikely to be those demanding the transformation of society that socialists want to see.

This is not a new issue, and not one which is confined to the UK. Since Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875, revolutionaries have warned against the rise of reformism, seeking to bring about social change without the working class taking control of the levers of power for themselves. Yet reformism has always had a powerful allure, offering the tempting prospect of change now, not waiting for the workers to become an organised revolutionary force. However, its effects have had a mixed impact on working class consciousness, due to the conflict between the promise of change and the lived experience of workers. In the introduction to his book The Vote: How it was won and how it was undermined, Paul Foot quotes a nurse he was speaking to in 2003. 'my mother used to tell me it was our duty to vote, out of respect for the people who fought for it. I've always followed her advice, but now I'm not so sure.' [Foot:2012: xiv]

THE ULTRA-LEFT AND ELECTIONS
I have no wish to be sectarian, and what I present here is a broad summary of ultra-left arguments, rather than an address to any particular group, and show why I think that this attitude is mistaken. The main purpose of this section is to draw out why socialists should not ignore elections in a capitalist society, rather than to straw-man another party or left group.

It is tempting, when you see that Labour have no intention of creating a socialist society, and wax lyrical about the importance of business, how even 8 years after Blair left office a Milliband government would still be intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes – but now even the tax money would just go back to buying nuclear weapons and keeping financial institutions afloat, rather than ending the devastating cuts to the services that working people deserve and rely on; it is tempting to sack off the whole electoral arena as a bad job.

More than this, a socialist can quite reasonably point to the ways in which socialist governments elected under a capitalist system have been destroyed when they threaten the capitalist order. In Chile this was at the barrels of Pinochet's tanks. In Nicaragua through the wholesale manufacture of an opposition by the US government. In the UK, the very moderate Wilson government was subject to plans for a coup d'etat by forces within the British Army and MI5. Capitalist societies use a mixture of consent and coercion to maintain their rule. Usually they prefer to give the impression that a government is democratic and the choice of the people, but when their interests are threatened, the mask falls away – as the Syriza government and Greek people are finding out for themselves at the moment.

Given these practical problems, a serious revolutionary may well want to leave the politicians to their own devices and focus solely on building within the working class, ignoring the ballot box to build a revolutionary democracy. Certainly we in the SWP would agree that real power lies within the working class. This is the class of people who are exploited by the system and therefore those without whose labour profit cannot be made. This gives workers the power to change the world.

However, this ultra-leftist thinking must be challenged. For a start, we must start from where the class is now, and for the majority of workers the main political parties and parliamentary elections are politics. Voting is seen as an important enough activity for 6 out of 10 people to vote in national elections, even after 30 years of declining turnout (turnout was above 80% for the immediate post-war governments but has been steadily dropping since the neoliberal consensus of the late 1970s was formed). If we want to be seen and heard we must engage with the political arguments that most people hear on the radio, read in the papers and see on the TV and web.

Secondly, elections are the only time where big political questions about what kind of society we want can be put, certainly as far as the media, MPs and councillors are concerned. When the votes are in, governments tend to act as though they can do as they want – and why not? There is no way to recall an MP, no councils to which they are themselves accountable, and a government with a parliamentary majority has the immense powers of the state, both in terms of persuasion and coercion, at its command. But a general election is a time when there is the public space, however limited, to articulate an alternative to the politics of capitalism. If we can field candidates to stand in these elections we can be much more visible.

Thirdly, whilst other parties will tell the electorate that they can solve their problems, as socialists we can demonstrate our politics in a better way. We can fight – and be seen to fight – for reforms and improvements to workers' lives, but we can also be honest with constituents about why our current system prevents us from doing more, and help build the confidence of workers to fight. This is what councillors like Michael Lavalette in Preston have been able to do.

Fourthly, this election in particular is unusual. The polarisation of society that austerity has produced, the extreme levels of inequality, the palpable unfairness of Tory measures like the Bedroom Tax and persecution of benefits claimants, the wage cuts taken by workers and the massive increase in wealth of the richest, have created anger and unrest. The inability of the Labour Party to articulate an alternative to this, and indeed the commitment of the Labour Party to Tory spending plans and unpopular and unworkable ideas ranging from Trident to free schools, have left much of its working class base unwilling to turn out to vote for it. As I mentioned earlier, turnout has been dropping for some time.2 In the last election it dropped below 60% for the first time. When 4 out of 10 people do not vote there is a large constituency who are not being represented. This time, with Labour doing its level best to promise to do nothing about any of the most important things which affect working people's lives, the gap is potentially even bigger. Into this vacuum are stepping a range of groups, like the Greens and nationalists like the SNP and Plaid Cymru. They can seem – and in some cases are – progressive candidates with a more positive vision, but fundamentally they are at best reformist and at worst hold pretty much the same set of interests or reactionary views as the current ruling class, such as pro-business SNP and the bigot's current party of choice, UKIP. Anyone who has taken part in anti-UKIP activity will be familiar with the refrain from those who are determined to support UKIP: 'they're better than the other lot – they say what they think', and indeed what they think is that the people most vulnerable to discrimination deserve to be victimised at national policy level. This fragmented political landscape is still new territory for many of us, who have spent all our lives under the Labour / Tory hegemony. We must seize this opportunity where we can to put an alternative vision forward, one which is based upon genuine equality and democracy, and rejects the immigrant-bashing, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic finger-pointing of reactionary distraction that diverts working people from their real class enemies and encourages them to turn on members of their own class.



THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE: THE ARGUMENT FROM THE RIGHT

There is a right-wing argument which anyone on the left will have heard in various forms – you must vote for Labour, as there is no realistic alternative to the Tories other than them. Britain is not, after all, on the brink of a socialist revolution. There are no soviets, there is no dual power, the working class fightback to austerity has been sporadic at best, anaemic at worst. At elections we must remember the differences between the Tories, the party of capital, and Labour, the party of the unions, and grit our teeth and vote for them. Even Tony Benn, who spoke at many Marxism festivals, was President of the Stop The War Coalition, and once wrote in his diary about an election event in 2001 'like all these great events, they're organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. The Labour Party organises absolutely nothing in support of any campaign ... The Socialist Workers' Party organises' [Benn 2003:661] remained loyal to the Labour Party to the end of his life. This has certainly been put forcefully in previous elections, and a softer version of it is all over social media this time around.

This time around, the argument is at the weakest it has ever been. In addition to all this psephological upheaval I have just mentioned people have learned that coalitions don't end the world, and much of the election conversation is about future coalition possibilities. This gives the left our best chance to grow electorally for a long time, and although this cannot replace a focus on the working class and working class power, it should not be taken to mean that a serious socialist electoral presence will damage the ability of socialists to organise – quite the reverse. As one of our Central Committee members, Marxist academic Alex Callinicos, has pointed out:

the main parties ... share of the vote continues to decline, along with their membership and their reach into a society that ... has become much more atomised since Thatcher's advent in 1979. Weakened social moorings at the base are matched at the top by leadership staffs slavishly loyal to the neoliberal elite consensus and obsessively geared to staying ahead of the news cycle. ... when things go wrong, with an activist base too thin to hold the line, votes can haemorrhage easily to smaller parties outside the consensus. [Callinicos 2013:5]

However, things are clearly not as dire for the Labour Party as all that. Len McCluskey, the leader of the biggest trades union in the UK, Unite, has not let the very public attempt to attack Unite members in Falkirk distract him from the vital mission to 'reclaim' the Labour Party for the left (although the Labour Party has always been very much a product of the right-wing of the labour movement), and even high-profile outspoken critics of austerity such as Owen Jones have joined in this crusade. In addition, although UKIP is definitely taking votes that would normally have gone to the Labour Party, for the Tories this effect is two or three times worse. Nevertheless, although we are not seeing a collapse of the Labour Party or anything like it, we are seeing the effects of a long period weakening of support related directly to its refusal to defend workers effectively, let alone push for more workers' power. We must not let the electoral arena remain uncontested by socialists, especially in such (relatively) favourable conditions.

RUSSELL BRAND AND THE VOTE

Russell Brand's Newsnight announcement that he doesn't vote and wouldn't encourage others to either has created one of those debates that the capitalist media likes to indulge in from time to time, in which an apparently dangerous idea is toyed with on the comments pages of berliners, tabloids and the broadsheet, before being quietly put away once the clickbait dies down. I thought that if we're talking about the vote in 2015, there should be some mention of the printed furore that he sparked. Brand also comes from an unusual place, as he is patently finding his political feet and frequently veers between autonomism, socialism and anarchism in his politics, so in dealing with his argument we see slight variations in both the argument from the ultra-left, and from the right. In his book from last year, Brand clarified his point – that the system is broken, and that participation in a broken system does no good at all. Instead, we should work to replace that system in its entirety, not legitimise the capitalist state by giving it our vote.

There is something attractive in this argument, and when I first heard it, I thought to myself, 'I quite agree with that, actually.' But here's the problem with that: not voting won't stop the election of a government whilst a majority (or even a large minority) still have illusions in the system. We are patently not at that point. If we were, this country would be in a pre-revolutionary state of dual power. We clearly are not. So I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Brand's sentiment, and I can understand his line of argument, but I think that if we are serious revolutionaries then it is no point putting ourselves so far ahead of the class that no one can see us.

DEBATES WITHIN THE SWP

The question of elections has been discussed and debated within the SWP over the last few years, not least in the pages of our magazine, Socialist Review. Just prior to the last elections, contributors both to articles and the letters pages argued about the extent to which socialists should call for support for Labour at the ballot box, but over the last few years we have seen two electoral formations around which the British left, notorious for its history of sectarian struggles, has begun to coalesce – Left Unity and TUSC. The two are different kinds of electoral vehicle in terms of the way in which they are composed, but both seek to establish a parliamentary left alternative to Labour. As Left Unity doesn't permit the membership of organisations, we have put our organisational support behind TUSC, which involves a combination of political parties such as ourselves and the Socialist Party, and trades unions such as the RMT.

Unfortunately the SWP has not been without internal problems over the last few years. Politically there developed a split in the party between a majority which retained its focus on the working class as the agent of change, and a minority which wanted to shift the focus to movements, which have had a significant impact on the political landscape in recent years, from the anti-capitalist movement that began in Seattle to the Stop the War Coalition and environmental movements. After a fairly acrimonious split, we have moved towards the view that there is a genuine prospect for left of Labour candidates in parts of the UK, particularly Scotland, where the Radical Yes campaign was widely supported and where Labour's support for the union and austerity has effectively destroyed its electoral chances. We have sought working alliances with other political parties and groups from the Communist Party to Left Unity to the National Health Action Party to this end. As our National Secretary, Charlie Kimber, noted in an article in Socialist Review last November, we are standing in the tradition of Marx, Engels and Lenin in so doing. Often in my talks I end with a quote, because if someone has said it well, it hardly seems worth saying it poorly, so here is some Marx, Engels and Lenin.

Even though Lenin was no fan of the British Labour Party, saying that it 'is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers.' [Jones 2010] He also agreed with Marx and Engels on the subject of parliamentary politicians when they said:

These poor, weak-minded men, during the course of their generally very obscure lives, had been so little accustomed to anything like success that they actually believed their paltry amendments, passed with two or three votes' majority, would change the face of Europe.

They had, from the beginning of their legislative career, been more imbued than any other faction of the assembly with that incurable malady, parliamentary cretinism, a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which has the honour to count them among its members. [Kimber 2014]


However, they also said:
Even when there is no prospect whatever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces and to lay before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. [ibid.]
A point which Lenin echoed when arguing with a member of the Italian ultra-left.
You say that parliament is an instrument with the aid of which the bourgeoisie deceives the masses, but this argument should be turned against you, and it does turn against your thesis. How will you reveal the true character of parliament to the really backward masses, who are deceived by the bourgeoisie? How will you expose the various parliamentary manoeuvres or the positions of the various political parties if you are not in parliament, if you remain outside parliament? [ibid.]
In my view, the current trajectory of the party is correct; however I would also say that we should have begun trying to build bridges with the other left groups much earlier, as we enter the election still without a fully-united left front, which gives us a lower starting point than we would like. If it had not been for the internal crisis, itself born of decades of defeats and defensive battles against the neoliberal consensus, perhaps we would have been able to do so. However, we are moving now and comrades have been putting considerable energy into campaigns in various parts of the country. By the next general election we will hopefully be starting from a point of some good left votes and networks of socialists who have experience of working together, without losing sight of the purpose of these elections: to galvanise working class self-activity and enable us to go on the offensive against the system which exploits and oppresses billions of people around the world.


SUMMING UP – CLIFF
There is an interview with Tony Cliff, founder of the SWP, on Youtube. He covers a wide range of topics in half an hour (my personal favourite being where he compares the choice between Major and Blair as between being sold a choice between contracting syphilis and cholera), but at one point is asked about elections. He says that the SWP had stood candidates in the 70s and that it was a massive mistake, because our votes were derisory. We could pull thousands to campaigns and support for strikes, but at the ballot box Labour held a solid grip on the working class. I agree wholeheartedly with Cliff: that standing candidates is not wrong itself, it is wrong tactically, when a bourgeois social democratic party is confident and holds significant hegemony within the class. This was the case in the 1970s. In a month's time this prediction may look hilariously naive, and following press stories over the last few weeks show that Labour is able to gain traction by belatedly condemning the excesses of the super-wealthy (even while never mentioning the word 'class'), but I believe that there is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that Labour's ability to claim the vote of the working class is weakening, and that our electoral future is looking more fragmented. Such a landscape may offer fertile ground to socialists, providing that we never forget that the class and the workplace is where true power and democracy reside, and that parliament is not the end of any serious revolution.


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benn, Tony. 2003. Free At Last! Diaries 1991-2001. Arrow Books.
Brand, Russell, 2014. Revolution. Century.
Callinicos, Alex. 2013. Where is the British left going? International Socialism, 139. Available at: http://www.isj.org.uk/www.isj.org.uk/indexa531.html?id=901&issue=139
Cliff, Tony. 1996. Interview, found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XOcAW64kAQ retreived 15/04/15.
Foot, Paul. 2012. The Vote: How it Was Won and How It Was Undermined. Bookmarks Publications.
Gott, Daniel. 2010. Should socialists argue for a vote for Labour? Socialist Review, 344. Available at: http://socialistreview.org.uk/344/should-socialists-argue-vote-labour-0
Jones, Jonny. 2010. Should socialists argue for a vote for Labour? Socialist Review, 344. Available at: http://socialistreview.org.uk/344/should-socialists-argue-vote-labour
Kimber, Charlie. 2014. The crisis in mainstream politics presents a challenge for the left, Socialist Review, 396. Available at: http://socialistreview.org.uk/396/crisis-mainstream-politics-presents-challenge-left
Shelley, Percy. 2003. The Major Works including poetry, prose and drama. OUP.
Socialist Workers Party, Where We Stand, SWP Online: http://www.swp.org.uk/about-us. Retrieved 09/04/15.
1This point relies upon a Marxist analysis of political economy, and one which would require a more in-depth discussion than would be helpful to the subject of this talk. I will briefly summarise it in this way: capitalism goes through periodic crises of overproduction which in the usual way leads to the mass closure of businesses and the cheap sell-off of their assets, which helps towards restoring profitability to the system. In the case of the current crisis however the complex financialisation which capitalism has produced in its old age has been used to prop up failing businesses, and the use of public debt to allow the banks to continue in business has propped up the financialisation. This has created a long, drawn-out crisis where mass unemployment has been comparatively low, but profits have not been restored either.
2 Mainstream politicians like to call this voter 'apathy', but as someone who spends a lot of time on the streets doing political activity I feel safe in saying that although few people may be fully paid-up revolutionary socialists at the moment, people are not short of political opinions. What they are short of is a party which expresses their opinions or aspirations.

Friday 10 April 2015

Update #57

Hello everyone,
Welcome to this week's update on the political happenings in Derby from the Socialist Workers Party!

Branch Meetings

The SWP is a party of activists who know that we need to understand the world to be effective in our actions. Our meetings have a discussion about key issues: economic, political, historical and cultural; as well as planning for events and activities.

We have now uploaded the text of our recent meeting on the Ukraine - link to the post.

After this week's great discussion on the topic of civil rights, which took in everything from the US prison system to discrimination in the UK to identity politics, we are looking forward to our meeting next week on to vote or not to vote? Socialists and elections Thursday 16th April, 7 pm, West End Community Centre.



The following week we take a look at the economic situation 8 years after one of the greatest crises in capitalism became a permanent feature of our lives, with Marxist theory of crisis - The nature of the current long depression. Thursday 23rd April, 7 pm, West End Community Centre.


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Derby Stand Up To UKIP activities


The weekend of 11th - 12th April will be a Stand Up To UKIP weekend of action! There will be two activities on Saturday 11th April. Please come to either if you're brilliant, both if you're amazing!

At 11.00 we will have one of our fortnightly stalls at the Ram statue near the Intu Centre.

At 12.30 we will be doing door-to-door leafleting in the Derwent ward. Meet up at Derwent Community Library.

If you're interested in finding out more, email sutuderby@gmail.com

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Silk Mill Rally



The annual Silk Mill march and rally, which commemorates the struggles of Derby's workers in one of the first industrial strikes the world has ever seen, is approaching. This will be on Saturday April 25th. It is a great opportunity to celebrate working class resistance and organisation, so join the march, organised by the Derby Trades Union Council and with the support of all the trades unions in the city!




Can't make our meetings?


If you want to find out more about us, meet some of our comrades, sign up to any of our petitions, find out about campaigns we are involved in, buy our paper or get hold of some of our other literature, why not come along to the campaign stall on Saturdays?

Find us on St Peter's St from 12 pm!

Wednesday 8 April 2015

Crisis in Ukraine

One of our recent meetings was on the subject of the situation in Ukraine at the moment. The comrade who gave a talk on the topic has given us his notes to publish. We had a great discussion about an area that many comrades in the branch were not very familiar with - enjoy!

Crisis in Ukraine
 
Events in Ukraine are the result of a dialectical process involving amongst other things: the imperialist rivalry between Russia and the West; the economic collapse of Ukraine; the struggle for power between the oligarchs who dominate Ukrainian political life and various ethnic tensions. Since the fall of the Soviet Union the EU and NATO have sought to expand their sphere of influence into the former Soviet Bloc, while Russia has tried to retain influence, and where possible restore its dominance there, through the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU). The balance of power has long been in the West’s favour. Russia could do little or nothing as one by one Eastern European countries, including the Baltic states, signed up to the EU and NATO. By 2009 12 former communist states had joined NATO, 11 of them also joined the EU.

The rivalry of these regional economic blocs is an expression of the economic competition that exists between them. At stake are vast resources and markets. Each bloc is compelled to seek maximum competitive advantage against its rival in Russia’s “near abroad” to strengthen its competitive position in the world market. None of the states involved, however, fall neatly into one economic sphere of influence or the other. They all have conflicting interests in both Russia and its ECU partners, as well as in the EU. Most are heavily dependent on Russian gas and energy supplies. They are, like the principle rivals themselves, highly interdependent on one another.

Despite this the rules of both “partnerships” preclude membership of both blocs. The impact of the world economic crisis of 2008-9 on trade and rising deficits combined with rapidly depleting reserves greatly increased the pressure on the ruling classes of states outside the main trading blocs to seek “partnerships” deals or membership status, whatever the costs. Both Russia and the EU have attempted to use this to shape the economic, administrative and, to some extent, the political structures of these states, albeit by different means, and with differing degrees of success. In Marxist terms, we are back to the classic analysis of imperialism – the development of economic competition between blocs of capital – and military rivalry between states. Most people on the Left will agree with accusations of imperialism by the West, however, some would dispute the same accusation being made against Russia. I will, therefore, deal with this in some detail later in my talk when I look at the situation in Ukraine today. Ukraine gained its independence from the USSR in a strugglei, involving both western and eastern Ukrainians that lasted from 1989 to1991. In the subsequent referendum on independence the turnout was 84%. Even in the industrial regions in the east, such as Donetsk and Luhansk, where the majority were Russian speakers and which had the highest number of ethnic Russians, support for independence did not dip below 83%. The one exception was Crimea where support for it fell to 54%.

The hopes inspired by independence, however, were dashed on the rocks of the shock therapy and hyperinflation that followed it. Annual inflation for the period 1993-5 averaged 2,001% per year. The figure for Russia for the same period was 460% per year. Living standards plummeted and lifetime savings and pensions evaporated. Ukraine is the only Eastern European state whose level of production stands at pre-1993 levels. A minimal recovery was followed by the 2008 crisis: world steel prices fell; national debt on vast foreign loans mushroomed and reserves disappeared. The economy contracted by 15% and the currency lost 40% of its value. The per capita income of Ukrainians in 2013 was 3,900 (US dollar equivalent) compared to 13,432 in Poland and 14,612 in Russia. Male life expectancy was 63.78 (61.2 in east Ukraine) compared to 71.73 in Hungary; 72.74 in Poland and 64.37 in Russia. Faced with this crisis elements of the ruling class in both the east and the west of Ukraine used divide and rule tactics to maintain and build support. Russian speakers in Ukraine were portrayed by Ukrainian nationalists as colonisers, who belonged to a foreign fifth column bent on destroying Ukraine’s culture and its language and who were guilty by association with the famine and the purges of the 1930sii.

On the other hand the politicians who looked to Russia portrayed the Ukrainian speakers in the west as filthy Galician Nazi collaborators. The result of all this was a marked increase in the proportion of the population who were concerned about ethnic conflict. Between 2009 and 2014 it rose from 37% to 73%, having fallen from 50% in 2002 to 37% in 2009. All this helped the rise of Svoboda.

It is important, therefore, to remember that there are other factors that unite people across the ethnic divide. Between 2003 and 2010 the percentage of bilingual people has risen from 18.9% to 40.3%. Over a vast swathe of Ukraine, including the east, ethnic Ukrainians speak Russian, intermarry with ethnic Russians and converse in both languages at home, work and with friends and neighbours. Similarly, the most important issues for young Ukrainians were: the right to work; the right to education; freedom from arbitrary arrest; freedom of speech; freedom of movement and freedom of conscience; not ethnic divisions.

By the end of 2013 the Ukrainian ruling class was desperate. The Central Bank had two months of foreign reserves left and Ukraine was judged twice as likely as Greece to default. Ukraine desperately needed a bailout from the EU, the IMF or Russia. President Yanukovych had been trying to balance between the EU and the ECU. He had sought observer status in the ECU while at the same time negotiating the Association Agreement with the EU. The looming economic crisis, however, and the “take or leave it” terms presented by both Russia and the EU would not allow this balancing act to continue. After some hesitation Yanukovych turned to Russia and refused to sign the Association Agreement that had been negotiated with the EU.

It was this action that triggered the Maiden protests, which began in the autumn of 2013. The students who made up the initial protests looked to the market, Europe and the West for an alternative to the corruption of the Ukrainian elite and a way out of the economic collapse of Ukraine. However, the protests could never develop into a national movement involving eastern Ukrainians as long as their demands were hitched to the EU and the West. By the end of November the protests were on the wane. Yanukovch’s decision, however, on 30 November to use the Berkutiii to clear the square, rather than ending the protests, had the opposite effect, Demonstrations of tens of thousands were transformed into ones of hundreds of thousands and more, By early December up to half a million demonstrated. As the demonstrations got bigger the motivation of the demonstrators changed. When asked to choose which three political demands they most supported, signing the EU Agreement came fourth, with less than half the protestors including it as a demand. First, by a significant margin, was the release of those arrested on the Maiden and an end to repression; second was the dismissal of the government and third came the resignation of Yanukovych and early presidential electionsiv.

Confrontations and demonstrations continued through the winter. Rather than backing down the government on 16 January passed a series of anti-protest measures which became known as “the dictatorship laws”v. These triggered a further wave of mass protests against which the Berkut launched its most murderous onslaught. Over 100 protestors were killed. The protests, however, continued, in the end Yakunovych fled and the ruling Party of the Regions all but collapsed as its oligarch supporters and deputies deserted it. The beneficiaries of this were the pro-Western politicians who brought the fascists of Svoboda and the Right Sectorvi on board, appointing them to key ministerial positions. It is, of course, extremely worrying that the far right has played such a prominent part in the Ukrainian crisis, but this does not mean that events in Ukraine were a right-wing putsch from beginning to end as some on the left have argued. It was not Svoboda, the Right Sector or the pro-Western politicians who turned the early demonstrations into mass protests. The decision by Yanukovych and his supporters to use extreme force did this, and therefore he brought about his own downfall.

His flight left a vacuum that the pro-Western politicians stepped into. The West threw its support behind these politicians and disgracefully ignored the reactionary character of the regime and the role of Svoboda and the Right Sector. This support continued through the massacre of anti-Kiev nationalists in Odessa on 2 May and also ignored the over 3,000 people killed and the million displaced in eastern Ukraine as a result of the so-called “Anti Terrorist Operation”. In the struggle with the separatists in the east the Kiev Government was forced to use the Right Sector and other nationalist military forces because of the disaffection within the Ukrainian military and their families, and the delapidated state of the Ukrainian armed forces. In June 2014, for example, one of these groups, the Azov batallion, was assigned by the Interior Ministry to keep control of Mariupol after it captured the city from Russian-backed insurgents. The nature of the Azov battalion is clearly shown by the fact that their base in Mariupol was covered with swastikas.

Nevertheless it would be a mistake to see the struggle of the separatists or Russia’s involvement as anti-fascist, or any less reactionary than its counterpart in the west. We only have to think about the character of Putin and the people around him to realise that this view is difficult to sustain in reality. Anti-fascist rhetoric by Russia has a long Stalinist and reactionary pedigree. It had been used: to condemn men, like Bukharin, in the ‘Show Trials’; to discredit the East German Uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; and to justify the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Since the end of the 1980s the government has used the charge of “national fascism” to whip up Russian antagonism towards the independence movements in the former Soviet Republics. When Yanukovych fell and Ukraine turned West Putin was forced to use Russia’s geopolitical advantage and military resources to destabilise Ukraine, in order at the very least, to prevent it from integrating fully into a Western economic and military alliance. Russia has always drawn red lines around its bordering states: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kazachistan. Ukrainevii is, by far, the most important of these and it joining the ECU was essential to Putin’s regional economic project. Without Ukraine the ECU would just consist of Russia, Belarus and Kazachistan, an altogether reduced project, and one that other states would have less incentive to join. If Ukraine were to slip out of Russia’s orbit altogether, Russia’s regional and global position would be immeasurably weakened. Russia’s strategy over Ukraine followed the pattern of intervention it had adopted since the 1990s.

Apart from the invasion of Chechnya after it declared its independence, Russia has avoided becoming militarily involved in neighbouring statesviii. Instead Russia has fostered national and ethnic conflicts that destabilised these neighbouring states and made them dependent on Russia’s goodwill. This policy led to a series of bloody conflicts across Russia’s near abroad in which Russia played a key role. These included the separatist conflicts between Georgia and the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; Moldova and its pro-Russian breakaway Transnistria and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nogorno-Karabakh. Rather than committing large number of troops and armour in these areas, Russia relied on volunteers, often highly trained, experienced middle ranking military and intelligence officers, to lead and direct local forces on the ground and to provide a conduit for Russian arms and logistical supplies. The strategy enjoyed great success in 2008 when Russia humiliated the West in a short five day war to prevent Georgia from joining NATO.

In the course of these conflicts there emerged a layer of deeply reactionary Russians who were motivated by dreams of restoring the Russian/Soviet Empire. Many of these figures gravitated around the far-right “Eurasianist” movement led by the fascist Alasandr Duginix, the anti-Semitic newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow) and the news network Den (the Day) led by the far right reactionary Alekdandr Prokhanov. They were part of an alliance of Stalinists, great Russian chauvinists and outright fascists whose leading figures were cultivated at arms length by the Kremlin. Dugin is seen as the driving conceptual force behind Putin’s decision to annex Crimea. Crimea houses Sebastopol which is Russia’s vital naval base on the Black Sea, but is leased from Ukraine. It had been the touchstone for Great Russian chauvinists since the 1980s. Year after year there have been demands, including from within the Kremlin and the Russian parliament, to annex it. This has never had anything to do with the right to self determination of an oppressed minority. It has only ever been about exerting Russian dominance, not only over Ukraine, but across Russia’s entire periphery. The networks who had earned their military spurs in previous proxy conflicts helped to build a political bridgehead for Russia in Crimea. These included the deeply reactionary Sergei Aksyonovx who took the post of Crimean prime minister, despite his party only getting 4% in the 2010 election: and Igor Girkinxi, Alexander Borodaixii, Igor Bezierxiii and Vladimir Antyufevxiv. They were all veterans of previous conflicts, particularly in Transnistria. Antyufev, the lesser known, but possibly the most significant figure served as security chief in Transnistria and he was involved in a failed coup in Latvia in 1991. Girkin, Borodai, Bezler and Antyufev have all been active in eastern Ukraine. Their connections were critical in ensuring a flow of arms, supplies and volunteer fighters from Russia.

There is no doubt that the separatists have won an important level of support because of their political opposition to the government in Kiev and the slaughter initiated by Kiev in the east. This does not alter the fact, however, that they can only exist as a proxy for Russian interests in Ukraine. In fact while the separatists secured substantial passive support against Kiev they were never able to mobilise a mass uprising or sustain their occupations beyond some towns and cities in the two regions where the ethnic Russian population is highest. Active support for the fighters has been limited. Girkin, himself, complained vehemently of this, accusing the east of being cowards. In fact a few weeks before the NATO summit in Newport during September 2014 the separatists of eastern Ukraine had appeared to be on the verge of defeat and Putin faced humiliation in Russia’s “near abroad”. He was unable to intervene because he was afraid that the fantasies of the mainly Russian leadership of the separatists of restoring the Russian empire were dragging Russia into becoming a permanent occupying force in eastern Ukraine. He managed, however, to reassert his authority over his own proxies, e.g. Borodai stepped down as P.M. of the DPR and was replaced by Plotnisky.

With a leadership more compliant to Moscow Putin committed the logistical support and the detachments of Russian troops necessary to turn the tide. In mid-August the separatists were able to mount a successful counter offensive, equipped with Russian weaponry and supplies. The Ukrainian government claimed that Russian soldiers spearheaded the attack. Whatever the precise combination of forces the Ukrainian army and its militias were thrown into retreat. Newly elected Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko was forced to agree to a ceasefire, the Minsk Protocol, on 5 September. Elections for Parliament followed in Octoberxv. By January 2015 the ceasefire had broken down. After heavy fighting, on 21 January, DPR forces captured the symbolically important Donetsk International Airport, and the last part of the city of Donetsk that had been under Ukrainian control. By late January the separatists were mounting an offensive on the important railway and road junction of Debaltseve, which they took control of on 15 February. Meanwhile after talks with Poroshenko and Putin, on 7 February Merkel and Hollande put forward a new peace plan. It was similar to the Minsk protocol and was agreed on 12 February. Under its terms Ukraine’s parliament was supposed to officially recognize a special status for the separatist controlled DPR and Luhansk People’s Republic. Disputesxvi about the implementation of these proposals now threaten the fragile peacexvii. The West has not been able to offer overt military support because of the strength of the anti-war movement there and NATO’s problems of overstretch. Russia also has difficulties of its own. The war in Afghanistan and the first war in Chechnya aroused massive opposition in Russia and the legacy continues to hang over Russian foreign policy today. Its military re-equipment is extremely uneven and beset with problems. Russian growth has stalled and however popular Putin’s warmongering in eastern Ukraine appears on the surface, this is deceptive for a number of reasons. It is true that when polled over 50% of Russians said Russia should give support to the separatist leadership and the fighters in Donetsk and Luhansk, with 20% opposed and 20% unsure, but while 40% supported sending troops 45% were opposed. Another indication of the potential opposition to Putin is the anger among families and relatives at the secrecy and intimidation surrounding the scores of deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine while “on holiday”. Some 50,000 people demonstrated in Moscow against war a day before the Crimean referendum. The demonstrators not only opposed war but many, possibly a majority, opposed the annexation of Crimea itself.

For these reasons, in spite of the continuing posturing of the West and Russia, we are not on the brink of war, but this is not a conflict that will blow over and the rivalry over Ukraine poses real dangers and presents a serious challenge to the left and the anti-war movement. Clearly the starting point for revolutionaries and anti-war activists in Britain is to oppose any intervention by NATO in Ukraine.

However socialists should not downplay the character of the conflict or Russia’s role in it. Opposition to our own imperialists does not rest on having to disguise the role of its rivals. It is essential not to confuse inter-imperialist conflicts between rival imperialist powers with conflicts between major powers and subordinate and oppressed states. Russia is not Iraq or Afghanistan. It is a contender, albeit a weaker one than the US, in the imperialist world system. Russia occupies a vast territory and is still the world’s second nuclear power. It has its own imperialist interests, both in its own region and in other parts of the world including the Middle East. The solution to the Ukraine crisis lies not only on the anti-war movement in the West preventing military intervention by the West, but also on the reconciliation of western and eastern Ukrainians and the growth of opposition to Putin stopping further interference by Russia. It is only by insisting on the imperial nature of the conflict that there can be any chance of achieving all three things.

The working classes in those countries have to be convinced that the real enemy is their own government. The ultimate aim for socialists is not only to oppose war, but to turn the war between nations into a civil war between classes and to unite the workers of every country against the international “gang of robbers”. We obviously cannot do this by supporting our own government, but we equally cannot do this by supporting the government of the opposing side in any conflict between major imperialist powers.

NOTES
(i) The struggles began with strikes by miners who occupied their town squares, including in Donetsk. They were joined by miners in the heartlands of western Ukrainian nationalism. This inspired students who occupied the Maiden in 1990. Independence was secured when a large column of workers from Kiev’s largest factory, a core part of the Soviet military industrial complex, employing 10,000s marched on Parliament in support of the students. This forced the Soviets to hold a referendum on independence in 1991.

(ii) Svoboda’s rise had been helped by the predecessors of the current pro-Western politicians who had come to power after the Orange Revolution of 2004. When faced with the crisis of 2008 they employed a divide and rule strategy with a vengeance. The President Viktor Yushchenko promoted an ultra-nationalist reworking of history. The Nazi collaborators of Stephen Bandra were rehabilitated and Bandra himself was awarded the title of “Hero of Ukraine in 2010. Meanwhile the mainstream media gave increasing coverage to the Nazis of Svoboda. None of this helped Yushchenko. Totally discredited he got only 5% in the Presidential elections of 2010. It did however help Svoboba, who won 37 parliamentary seats in 2012.

(iii) The Berkut (Golden Eagles), the notorious interior ministry troops, were paid double the wages of the ordinary police and had a deeply anti-Semitic culture. Their roots lay in the Soviet OMON, which was formed at the end of the 1980s, to take on the miners and the independence movements.

(iv) In a poll of 1037 demonstrators in and around Maiden square on 7-8 December, 70% said they had come to protest against the police brutality on 30 November; 53,5% in favour of the EU Association Agreement; 59% to change life in Ukraine and 40% to change the power in the country. Only 17% said they were protesting against Ukraine entering Russia’s Customs Union or against the possibility of a turn back towards Russia. A negligible 5.4% said they had answered the calls of opposition leaders.

(v) The “Dictatorship Laws” included ten year jail terms for blockading government buildings, one year for slandering government officials or “group violations of public order”, amnesty from prosecution for the Berkut and law enforcement officials, and a host of other measures.

(vi) The Right Sector is a coalition of far right nationalist parties. It originated in November 2013 as a paramilitary confederation at the Euromaiden protests in Kiev, where its street fighters fought against riot police. The coalition became a political party on 22 March 2014, at which time it was estimated to have perhaps 10,000 members. It sees itself as continuing the tradition of Ukrainian partisans, such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought in the Second World War against the Soviet Union and both for and against the Axis. Yarosh, Right Sector's leader, has trained armed nationalists in military exercises since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Right Sector has received some financing from the Ukrainian diaspora.

(vii) It is no accident that competition between the EU and Russia came to a head over Ukraine. Ukraine is the largest country entirely in Europe. It shares borders with Hungary, Slovakia and Poland in the west; Belarus to the north; Russia to the north and east and Romania and Moldova and its pro-Russian breakaway Transnistria to the south. As the annexation of Crimea highlighted, Ukraine has a key strategic coastline on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, across which lie Turkey and the Caucasian states of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan (all subject to their own rivalries and conflicts). Beyond this area lie the Caspian Sea, Central Asia and China.

(viii) Even in Chechnya Putin took great care to foster a strong local Chechen regime under a former rebel, the brutal Kadyrov who was succeeded after his assassination in 2004 by his equally brutal and corrupt son.

(ix) Dugin is a Russian political scientist known for his fascist views and calls to hasten the “end of times” with all out war. He has close ties with the Kremlim and the Russian military having served as an advisor to the State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin a key member of the ruling United Russia party. Dugin was the leading organiser of the National Bolshevik Front and Eurasia Party. He wants the restoration of the Russian Empire through the unification of Russian speaking territories. In the Kremlin Dugin represents the “war party”. He believes war between Russia and Ukraine is inevitable and that a fifth column has been working for two decades to destroy Russia’s sovereignty. In 2014 he proposed that all dissidents should be stripped of their citizenship and be deported from the country.

(x) Aksyonov was suspected of criminal activities before he became involved in Crimean politics in 2008. In that year he became a member of “Russian Community of Crimea” and a member of the organisation “Civic Asset of Crimea”. He then borrowed almost $5 million from Kirilchuk, a former Crimean minister of industry, to develop the ‘Russian Unity’ party. Since 2009 he has been co-president of the Coordinating Council “For Russian Unity in Crimea” and leader of the political movement ‘Russian Unity’. In 2010 he became a deputy of the Supreme Council of Crimea as a member of Russian Unity which gained 4% of the vote giving it three seats in the Crimean parliament. On seizing power Aksyonov has promised that Ukrainian would cease to be an official language if Crimea joined Russia. He has led efforts to stamp out dissent among Crimean Tatars over annexation saying, “All activities aimed at non-recognition of Crimea’s joining to Russia and non-recognition of the leadership of the country will face prosecution under the law and we will take a very tough stance on this. He has also said that homosexuals, “have no chance” in Crimea and that “we in Crimea do not need such people,” He also promised that if gays tried to hold public gatherings “our police and defence forces will react immediately and in three minutes explain to them what kind of sexual orientation they should stick to.”

(xi) Girkin’s political views are close to Russian nationalism, monarchism and the White Movement. They are strongly influenced by the Russian Orthodox Church. He believes that Russia is driven by spirituality and in fact is “the only big, Christian country left in the world that is able to resurrect Christianity”. Girkin thinks that foreign conspirators have made attempts to destroy the Russian Empire. These included the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. They were made because the West needed Russian natural and human resources to continue its “age of hedonism”. These attempts will continue and so currently Russia is “at state of war with the whole Western civilisation attempting to destroy it”.

(xii) Boradai is a Russian citzen. In the 1990s he edited the Russian newspaper Zavtra run by Alexander Prokhanov. On 7 August 2014 he announced his resignation and was succeeded by Alexander Zakharchenko. Together they co-founded the “patriotic” Web TV channel Den-TV. Den-TV’s programming has regularly included Konstantin Dushenov, who has been imprisoned for anti-Semitic incitement. He worked as an adviser to Aksyonov, the prime minister of the Republic of Crimea. Boradai claims to have worked as a “political Strategist” during the annexation of Crimea and has stated that the political forces that facilitated the takeover are the same as those active in the Dontetsk Republic: “Naturally the people who set up these popular movements … are the same people, they are connected to each other … So when I finished the work in Crimea I automatically … came here to work in southeast Ukraine. On 16 May he was appointed Prime Minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic. He resigned as P.M. on 7 August 2014. He said, “I came here as a crisis manager, a start-upper if you want. I’ve managed a lot in the past several months, the DPR has been estblished as a state”.

(xiii) According to ‘Reuters’ Igor Bezler is one of the leaders of Horlivka - a self proclaimed militia. He was born in Simferopol in Crimea in 1965. He served in Afghanistan and was awarded the Order of the Red Star. Until 2002 he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Russian intelligence agency GRU, but a few years ago he retired and settled in the Gortovka region of Donetsk. He became active in the Self Defence forces that took over Crimea. He has been prominently involved in the separatist movement, particularly in the People’s Republic of Donestsk.

(xiv) Antyufeyez is a former OMON major and Riga police deputy chief of criminal investigation. He served as Riga OMON commander in 1990-1. He was heavily involved in the KGB failed pro-unity coup attempt in Latvia. After its failure Antufeyev fled to Moscow. In September 1991 he travelled to Tiraspol to take part in the Transnistrian independence movement. Adopting the new name of Vadim Shevstov, he played a key role in forming the internal and security organisations of the Transnistarian government, especially the Ministry of State Security. In 2012 he was dismissed by the president and a criminal investigation was launched against him, alleging abuse of power, misappropriation of funds and destruction of documents. He returned to Moscow. He said he worked on security in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Crimea. In July 2014, he appeared in eastern Ukraine as the ‘deputy prime minister’ of the Donetsk People’s Republic. The DPR head Alexander Boradai had met him in Moscow. He was put in charge of the rebel security forces, internal affairs, and courts of justice.

(xv) In the late October 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election Yarosh the Right Sector’s leader won a parliamentary seat by winning a single-member district with 29.76% of the votes. In the same election Right Sector spokesperson Boryslav Bereza standing as an independent candidate also won a seat with 29.44% of the votes. Svoboda, however, lost 31 of their 37 seats. The decline in support was due to the negative assessments of the activities of the local governments that included Svoboda members. In its former stronghold Lviv Oblast Svoboda won no constituencies. On 12 November 2014 the party's ministers in the Yatsenyuk Government resigned (they became acting ministers till a new Government was formed). The parties governors of Poltava Oblast. Temmopil Oblast and Ravine Oblast also resighned and were formally dismissed by President Poroshenkom on 18 November 2014.

(xvi) On 13 March the leaders of the DPR and the LPR, Alelsandr Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnisky respectively, jointly called on Hollande and Merkel to “put pressure” on Kiev to implement the deal agreed in Minsk, Poroskenko submitted a draft law that outlines the boundaries of particular areas under separatist control which was registered late on 14 March. But a Russian Foreign Ministry statement said the proposals put before Ukrainian MPs included “additional terms never previously discussed”, and that Poroshenko had “totally ignored” the Minsk provisions calling for dialogue with the separatists on arrangements for local elections and the regions”. The main issue seems to be the demand that the elections should take place before the granting of special status which means they would be controlled by the Ukrainians.

(xvii) In the wake of the Ukraine crisis NATO is establishing a “rapid reaction force” in the Baltic States and Eastern Europe. The Baltic states and Poland have demanded permanent NATO bases as opposed to the current temporary ones. Russia for its part has announced large-scale strategic exercises this September and has reminded the West that “Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations. This is a reality not just words”.