On Nick Griffin's general election stand

Following the news that Nick Griffin will be standing against culture minister Margaret Hodge to be MP for Barking, the BNP have kicked off their General Election campaign. The typically grandiose and self-important annocement that "BNP raises the battle standard" invites several observations.

First, and most glaring, is the fact that the party (and Griffin) don't stand for who they claim to. On the party website, the link to Griffin's constituency website has disappeared, with it the claim that the party leader was ever "standing up for the North West." The occasional story about the plight of a bird sanctuary or a wind farm having long given way to a much broader level of propaganda which marginalises those he is claiming to represent.

The use of Honduran sweatshops to produce BNP merchandise, when the North West has 38,000 textile workers, has also yet to be addressed by the MEP claiming to stand for "British jobs for British workers."

Thus, the fact that Griffin is abandoning his constituency in an attempt to become the party's first Westminster MP should come as no surprise. No doubt "standing up for Great Britain," the slogan of the party's Obama-lite website revamp, will turn out to be equally fatuous. Indeed, there are already hints that a BNP MP will be as expenses-hungry as any other, with Griffin having already used members' money to extend his home in 2001 and his expenses as an MEP being used to pay the salaries of almost the entire national party.

The cash-grabbing shows no signs of letting up, either, with yet another BNP begging letter accompanying the announcement of the election campaign. The format is the familiar one of glory-invoking language intertwined with constant pleas for more money;

The establishment are so terrified of a BNP victory they have tried to finish us off through membership freezes, huge legal costs and constant media attacks. That's why your financial support is not only appreciated, IT IS ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL TO OUR ELECTION CAMPAIGN AND OUR SUCCESS!

WE MUST, FOR OUR CHILDREN'S SAKE, SEIZE THIS GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY WITH BOTH HANDS AND SHOW THE WORLD WHAT REAL BRITS CAN ACHIEVE AGAINST THE ODDS. WE HAVE DONE THIS TIME AND TIME AGAIN THROUGH OUR PROUD HISTORY - ITS TIME WE DID IT AGAIN!

For the last couple of days, the media has been awash with publicity over my decision to stand in the constituency of Barking in the forthcoming General Election. This has terrified the opposition, because Barking was our best result in 2005. The BNP, once again, is not fighting this election to gain decent votes in certain areas - WE ARE FIGHTING TO WIN, AND I WANT YOU BY MY SIDE!

The BNP claim to stand up for the working class of Britain, but are clearly only interested in feathering their own nests and clutching for power. The BNP's puppet union, Solidarity*, campaigns for the right of workers to be BNP members and little else. Industrial disputes which cannot be linked back to race and immigration are ignored entirely by the party. And the BNP, of course, views all workers willing to stand up for their rights (unless against foreigners) as "anti-British Communists."

As Andrew Gilligan points out in the Telegraph, "the BNP will be hindered in both Barking and in Dagenham by the general expectation that the Tories will win nationally, which usually tends to depress the far Right vote." Indeed, it was Thatcher's call for a "clear end to immigration" that siphoned support to the Tories from the National Front.

But antifascists should not be complacent for this kind of "victory." Rather than let one anti-worker party draw support from a more fascist anti-worker party, we need to be active on the streets, campaigning for working class unity against fascism. Indeed, what Gilligan calls "the BNP’s legendary capacity for unforced error" has already offered plenty of ammunition.

On building settlements and breaking down walls in Palestine

On Saturday, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton told al-Jazeera that "Washington wants an end to illegal Israeli settlements." The words rang hollow, however, with her praise for Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu's "unprecedented restraint," which came "despite his refusal to halt settlement expansion," and her insistence that a halt to settlement expansion "was not a precondition for negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians." Clinton's aim, as Obama's on several occasions past, is to offer concilliatory words whilst US-Israeli rejectionism continues apace.

At the same time, other developments within Israel offer a suggestion of what is to come. According to the Independent, "the Israeli education minister has unveiled plans to take teams of senior army officers to high schools across the country to help teachers "foster the motivation" of pupils to serve in combat units following a decline in conscription rates." The announcement has "infuriated liberals," but minister Gideon Saar is unrepentant, and has "also said that he would experiment with publishing individual schools' conscription rates, a move aimed at embarrassing those with a higher than average proportion of "draft dodgers"."

The move, according to the Independent, comes amid "growing right-wing criticism of draft evasion, coupled with dissatisfaction among part of the public that not serving in the army has become more accepted in the society than in the past." To the contrary, however, recent events suggest that Israeli society is becoming ever-more hawkish.

On Tuesday, BBC News reported that "four Israeli soldiers have been disciplined for protesting against the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank." Those involved "received sentences ranging from three weeks in jail to confinement to their base for hanging an anti-eviction banner at their barracks near Hebron." The action is only "the latest in a series of anti-evacuation protests by some soldiers," with "some high-ranking officials" "concerned at the increasing number of religious Jewish soldiers who have refused to take part in the planned evacuation of some Jewish settlements in the West Bank."

However, this does appear to be at least partly propaganda. Considering that the building of illegal settlements and converse eviction of Palestinians continues apace, reports of pro-settler "dissent," such as Haaretz's story that "two Israel Defense Forces soldiers were expelled from their brigade and given 20 days in military prison, just a few days after they waved a pro-settler banner during their swearing-in ceremony," seem conveniently timed. Not that the media are lying, since the Israeli press is perhaps more honest than western outlets in reporting the situation in Palestine. But, certainly the actual disciplinary acts seem calculated to draw maximum press attention at a time when the settlements are drawing (mild, non-committal) criticism from the United States. As former minister Yossi Sarid arued in relation to the presence of the IDF in schools, "this plan says something about the militaristic character of Israeli society. It is definitely getting more militaristic."

The prospects for future peace, then, do not look healthy. However, there are still those willing to resist. Friday saw the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Unreported in the mass media, Anarchists Against the Wall marked this occasion with mass demonstrations, during which "demonstrators brought down a section of the eight meters tall concrete wall that cuts through the village [of Ni'ilin]'s land." The action was not without consequences, as "soldiers, positioned at the other side of the wall, fired scores of live rounds at the demonstrators as well as tear gas, and sprayed them with the "skunk-bomb" (a foul-smelling liquid)." Nonetheless, the event is a promising one.

As demonstrator Moheeb Khawaja said during the protest, "twenty years ago no one had thought the monster that divided Berlin into two could be brought down, but in only two days in November, it did. Today we have proven that this can also be done here and now. It is our land beyond this wall, and we will not give up on it. We will win for a simple reason - justice is on our side."

The Welfare Reform Bill: an uncompromising attack on the poorest

On Thursday, the Welfare Reform Bill returned to the House of Commons. Having had its final reading in the House of Lords, MPs have made their last adjustments to the bill and it is now set to become law. Over the past few months, womens' pressure groups All Women Count and Global Womens' Strike had been campaigning against various measures in the bill. In particular;

The Welfare Reform Bill threatens us with destitution by abolishing Income Support, the main benefit which recognises unwaged caring work. It forces mothers and other carers to be “available for work” and, if there are no jobs, to work for our benefits i.e. £1.60 an hour. Traumatised women fleeing domestic violence get only a three-month respite from jobseeking. Asylum seekers, who are not allowed to work, were the first to be made destitute. Some get a subsistence amount; in October, this was reduced to £5 a day.

Moreover, as Libby Brooks pointed out in the Guardian;

The bill is so lacking in concrete detail and so wide-ranging in scope – from compulsory drug-testing of claimants (opposed by Liberty) to the criminalisation of women who refuse to name the father of their children on birth certificates (opposed by Gingerbread) – that campaigners have been left befuddled as to where to concentrate their energies.

Despite this embarrassment of riches, one woman with firsthand experience has no problem pinpointing her least favoured gem – that women escaping domestic violence should be given but one month's grace before having to comply with job-seeking conditions. "By the time you get out, you don't know who you are any more," Marianne told me. "I was like a beaten dog in a corner. It took me three months to find somewhere to live. If I had gone for an interview, they'd have thought I was a nutter. Yet my future is now supposed to be at the discretion of a jobcentre adviser, who isn't even properly trained. It's a joke."

Several of these measures were the subject of amendments in the Lords, thanks to fierce campaigning from various pressure groups. However, upon returning to the Commons, the Bill lost a considerable amount of the amended legislation. Most notably, as the Guardian reported, "peers backed down over government plans to fine jobless single parents with pre-school age children if they did not prepare for work while receiving benefits." This compounds the financial squeezes faced by single parents after the introduction of a measure just last month "requiring single parents with children aged 10 or 11 to look for work, or risk losing benefits. Under the new rules, lone parents in this category will be switched from Income Support to the tougher Jobseeker's Allowance."

The Anarchist Federation have given their support to groups such as the London Coalition Against Poverty and Nottingham Claimants Action, both of which stand in opposition to the entire Bill. Their reasons for this are well founded, as covered in the AFed anaysis reposted here last Wednesday. The Bill is a fundamental attack on the welfare state, the only safety net we have against crushing poverty, and on the poorest and most vulnerable elements of the working class.

Perhaps the most tragic fact in all this is that the new legislation will be applauded by precisely the sectors of society it attacks. Though politicians are often accused of pandering to "tabloid mentality," it is in fact the other way around, with the media reflecting the opinions of elite sectors in order to manufacture the consent of the ruled. Hence the depth at which terms such as "sponger," "scrounger," or "dosser," and phrases such as "milking the system" have become ingrained into our collective consciousness.

Whilst, at a grassroots level, activists have been fighting against the vicious class war waged by the rich, the media has been telling us a different story. Tales of "scroungers" raising a "dynasty of deadbeats" litter rags such as the News of the World, the agenda behind such outrageous stories becoming clear when it uses them to advocate stripping single parents of welfare. Likewise, the Daily Mail will report with horror that "Labour's reign puts 300,000 families on handouts worth £20,000 a year," the context for this figure being buried in the article. The £20,000 figure is less shocking when added to the fact "a couple need to earn £25,000 a year before they can afford to have children," the actual figure for a family with two children being £27,600. Given that the quoted figure "include[s] a vast array of benefits, such as jobseekers' allowance, incapacity benefit, council tax benefit and housing benefit," and that those whose welfare reaches £20,000 are "families" or "households," emphatically not single individuals. According to A minimum income standard for Britain in 2009, the report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation cited above;

Working-age people on benefits remain well below the minimum income standard. Even though benefit rises in April 2009 exceeded the published inflation rate at the time, they were similar to the rise in the cost of a minimum household budget. This means that people on benefits have got no closer to reaching an acceptable living standard.

Thus, stories about "scroungers" and "the soaring welfare bill" are revealed as nothing but a pretext for dissecting a welfare system which already bars people from an "acceptable living standard." As Dr Paul Dornan, head of policy for the Child Poverty Action Group, wrote in a letter to the Guardian, "it creates a complex bureaucracy for issuing orders and punishments to claimants, and limits the childcare choices of the poorest parents. What has become unthinkable is a decent minimum income standard for all claimants and an entitlement to the good, personally tailored support that really helps to get people off benefits and into decent jobs." Moreover, according to Jean Brownlie of the Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty, "this bill is also an attack on workers in jobs, as it will exert downward pressure on wages and conditions ... poor people are being forced to pay for the financial crisis caused by the rich."

Thus, the only reasonable conclusion seems to be the one offered by Brownlie. "We need to oppose this bill by taking dissent to the streets, to the government offices, to the bankers and the bosses."

In solidarity with the indigenous people of the Niger Delta

Today, Reuters reports that "Suspected oil thieves in Nigeria have increased their attacks on Royal Dutch Shell-operated (RDSa.L) oil facilities." According to the company, "thieves sabotaged five oil wellheads in the oil-producing Niger Delta since Aug. 14, some resulting in fires." "Some estimates say 100,000 barrels of crude are stolen from the Niger Delta each day, about five percent of the country's crude production and equivalent to around $7.75 million daily or $2.8 billion a year at current prices." However, "no production was affected since most of the oilfields were already shutdown because of insecurity in the region."

The insecurity in question is the ongoing ethnic conflict in the Delta region, sparked by the exploitation of indigeonous peoples there. According to an Amnesty International report produced in June this year, "decades of pollution and environmental damage, caused by the oil industry, have resulted in violations of the right to an adequate standard of living, including food and water, violations of the right to gain a living through work and violations of the right to health." In particular, that "the government of Nigeria has given the oil companies the authority to deal with matters that have a direct bearing on human rights, without adequate oversight – and oftentimes without any oversight" is a significant problem;

When communities suffer environmental harm, they are frequently left to negotiate with the oil companies on action to address the problem and obtain redress. This process has fundamentally undermined access to effective remedy, contributed to ongoing violations and led to deeper poverty and deprivation.

All of which is exacerbated by "the level of dependence of Nigeria on oil and the fact that the Nigerian government is the majority partner in joint ventures." According to Amnesty, "multinational oil companies" and the Nigerian government bear the brunt of responsibility for the situation as it stands.

In its background coverage of the conflict, the BBC interviews Chief Sunday Inengite, who remembers with "sour regret" how foreign oil engineers "made us be happy and clap like fools, dance as if we were trained monkeys" at the discovery of oil in 1953. In the intervening years, "the environment has been damaged, affecting fish catches, and the small plots of land where people had grown crops are polluted by oil spills and gas flares," whilst the indigenous tribes "have not seen much of the money made" by the production.

Hence the situation today, which the corporate media continues to describe in terms of "theives," "criminals," and "rebels," echoing the rhetoric (and thus the stance) of the Nigerian government and oil companies. Even the BBC, which shows some sympathy to the "chaos and misery" faced by the people of the Delta, focuses its analyses upon the "bunkering" of the oil smugglers, and the government's international pleas for help, rather than on the actions of state and capital which first ignited and continue to stoke the troubles the region now faces.

The difference in perspective can be seen in the language used by the "impartial" broadcaster. Of those engaged in "bunkering," it is stated quite matter-of-factly that their trade "leaves in its wake chaos and misery for the people of the Niger Delta." However, oil companies such as Shell are "accused" of "complicity" in human rights abuses, but "den[y] any wrongdoing." That degree of ambiguity and doubt, not afforded those without significant state/corporate power, remains. Also telling is the suggestion that the corporation's "humanitarian gesture" to buy the silence of the families of torture and abuse victims, should "affect the current violent struggle" in any positive way.

No, as Amnesty suggest, "millions of people in the Niger Delta have seen their lives and livelihoods destroyed by Shell's approach to oil production." The only way to move towards any genuine peace in the region is to force Shell to "clean up its act." If you wish to support their campaign, then you can take various actions in support of the people of the Delta by following the link here.

Ultimately, however, it will be the actions of the indigenous of the Niger Delta themselves which are key to forcing an end to the injustice and exploitation. They might well take their example form indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Colombia who, as the Anarchist Federation tells us, have been drawing attention to their plight through direct action;

Motorways all over Ecuador were blockaded for days in late September as people from indigenous communities all over the country made their way to Quito to protest the destruction of their homelands by multinational mining and petroleum companies. Despite the anti-imperialist rhetoric of “21st Century Socialism” (in the same vein as Hugo Chavez and the rest of ALBA, the “Bolivarian Alliance”), the government of Rafael Correa has repeatedly granted concessions to the US and European corporations (as has Chavez in Venezuela). The internationally condemned destruction of Ecuador's Yasuní rainforest and the lives of the Waorani people who inhabit it by the oil company Texaco last year is just one example of multinationals simultaneously wiping out traditional communities and destroying some of the most biodiverse regions in the world in the pursuit of profit. As if this wasn’t enough, Correa's “Socialist” government is now planning on privatising much of the country’s water supply, for which the indigenous people will yet again suffer the most. The mass mobilisation at the end of September coincided with a national wave of university occupations, and students' and teachers' marches, as Correa attempts to end Ecuador’s constitutional guarantee of free university education. There have been problems linking these two struggles as the Stalinist dominated students' and teachers' organisations and the CONAIE leadership of “chieftains” were unable to get their act together enough to have a meeting, with the tiny anarchist movement unable to do anything but look on in despair. However, in a country where the past two governments have been brought down through popular pressure this confluence of forces is a potentially revolutionary mixture, partly explaining the brutality of the State’s repression so far: at least two students in Quito have been in jail without charge for over a month, and an indigenous leader was shot dead by police during the mobilisation. See Ecuador indymedia for further developments.

Meanwhile in Colombia the confluence of different social forces behind a shared political platform is even more pronounced as the MINGA Social y Comunitaria is under way. The MINGA started as an indigenous mobilisation around the same issues of multinationals displacing indigenous peoples and destroying their territory, except in Colombia the corporations are backed up by brutal paramilitary forces who operate with impunity thanks to their links with the Uribe government. Last October the people of the Cauca region marched hundreds of miles to Bogotá to camp on the grounds of the National University, where they made links with workers’ and students' organisations. This year, throughout the month of October, a series of demonstrations and “people's congresses” all around the country is building the MINGA into a mass movement inclusive of all of society, reinterpreting the original five-point programme of the Cauca peoples for the context of each locality, spreading the struggle across class lines. The MINGA is supported by Colombia's fledgling anarchist movement, as it offers an alternative form of radical politics to the Marxist-Leninist Guerrilla groups, such as FARC, whose corruption, kidnappings and forced “revolutionary taxes” in the areas they control have alienated much of Colombian society. In a country dominated by a corrupt, drug-trafficking, paramilitary-sponsoring, neoliberal gangster like Uribe (currently seeking a third term in office) there is a desperate need for a new type of revolutionary movement, and the MINGA (coming from an indigenous word for “building together”) looks like the closest thing to it. See www.asociacionminga.org for more information.

Although campaigns such as those offered by Amnesty are of course vital, in bringing such issues into the public consciousness, but we must never expect that we can "rescue" exploited peoples. Not only is such a thought patronising, but it potentially stifles the emergence of genuine grassroots resistance. Instead, we must begin to recognise such movements as they emerge, and be ready to offer them our solidarity.

Why Joe Glenton's arrest must be opposed

Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, the Royal Logistics Corps soldier who took part in an anti-war march at the end of last month, was arrested yesterday. According to the Times, "it is alleged that he led the demonstration in London on October 24 and that he spoke to the media in defiance of orders." On top of the four year sentence he faces if found guilty of desertion, for his refusal to return to Afghanistan, "the new charges carry a maximum of ten years in prison."

His wife has said that she is "particularly outraged" by his arrest. "Apparently it's acceptable for an officer to speak out for the war, but when a soldier speaks out against the war he's locked up for it and that's just double standards," she has said, adding that he husband was "very brave." His mother has also voiced support, asking "what's so scary about a Lance Corporal having his say? My son is only speaking out for what he thinks is right."

In response to this turn of events, which they have called "the persecution of a soldier who believes in telling the truth in accordance with his conscience," the Stop the War Coalition will be holding an "emergency protest" at 5pm tonight outside Whitehall. Though there are serious criticisms to be made of Stop the War, not least that they are a recruiting front for the Trotskyite Socialist Workers' Party, such displays of solidarity are important. LCpl Glenton has considerable support amongst both the wider public and ex- and serving members of the armed forces, and the government would like nothing better than to have his case dissapear into obscurity.

We must expect the hierarchy of the military to take action to suppress opposition to violent militarism. However, their success in such a high profile case could sound the death knell for the very idea of resistance by soldiers and thus for a practical, radical opposition to war and imperialism. Emphatically, we cannot let that happen.