Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways.  The point however is to change it.  Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Weekly subscriptions (£10/3 months £30 p.a.)  [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd.]      
No 1068 Nov 28 2000                                                                                                                                        25p 

Seminar Saturday 2pm. Rcpt.s please.

Deluded 'left' sucks working class into the phony 'norm' of bourgeois-imperialist 'democracy', deliberately diverting from the relentless revolutionary crisis now facing the international proletariat. Both Trot anti-communism and Stalinist philistinism are burying the crucial working-class need for Marxist-Leninist theory as the daily cutting edge to the class struggle. Grotesque distortions of history cannot conceal the rotten opportunism of either 'Socialist Alliance' or SLP/Lalkar, equally treacherous to Palestinian revolution. 'Left Labourism' is socialism's graveyard.

The saved deposits for 'Socialist Alliance' candidates from last week's by-elections will no doubt further hype the claim of being "a path (out of the sectarian impasse that held back the left in the 20th century), organised on democratic centralist lines with a revolutionary programme and full freedom of criticism, - a workers party worthy of the name", etc, etc.

It is the foulest opportunist deception imaginable. In theory, the 'left' sects could, over time, work out a correct and accepted revolutionary programme through democratic argument. In practice, these 'Alliances' are just a careerist electoral manoeuvre conducted by the very essence of petty-bourgeois class sectarianism, parasiting on the workers movement.

The appeal to the electorate of this and other 'left alternatives', gaining more than 10% of the ballot between them, as an interesting rebuff to the three major bourgeois parliamentary parties, might just make it possibly necessary to expose this 'Alliance' fraud from within at some stage as well as from without, if it catches on as a supposed serious 'revolutionary workers party worthy of the name'; but the arguments against this treacherous diversion, away from socialism and deeper into class collaboration, will remain constant throughout.

The nastiest stunt is that these alliances contain, knowingly, all the most viciously accomplished anti-communists of the Cold War era. Theirs is a perfected petty-bourgeois class mentality of counter-revolutionary hostility to every achievement of the 70 years development of planned workers states which flowed out of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. As dyed-in-the-wool enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat without exception, these middle-class reactionaries relished acting as fake-'left' stooges for every anti-Soviet stunt that imperialism came up with.

It is one thing for communist-thinking groups from different backgrounds to come together to accept combined majority decisions, or the temporary suspension of disagreements, or some provisional compromise positions in order precisely to operate in a wider communist-thinking arena so as all the better to get objective practical experience of class struggle truths. It is an altogether different activity to pretend to the working class that common cause is possible between the struggle for Marxist-Leninist revolutionary understanding and the counter-revolutionary history of such pro-Western middle-class scab dilettantes as the SWP and Militant (now SPEW).

Even worse is the implied pretence from the sectarian weekend 'school' just organised by Weekly Worker that the RSDLP, uniting Bolsheviks and Mensheviks intermittently between 1900 and 1917, was an earlier-era model for the 'Socialist Alliances' now in the UK. This is an insane analogy, showing utter philistine contempt for Marxist science and for the whole heroic history of anti-imperialist revolutionary struggle. No doubt due to the extraordinary circumstances at the time of an increasingly open threat of growing war danger between rival monopoly-imperialist powers, to which in Russia was added the extra intolerableness of Tsarist autocracy, - the clear need for the revolutionary overthrow of reaction was undisputed common ground between every last faction agitating within the socialist movement in Russia. Every single trend was steeped in this Marxist understanding of the revolutionary way forward. It is ludicrous for the CPGB to pretend that a similar situation to the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and anarchists in pre-1917 Russia is implied by the CPGB 'school' claim for the Socialist Alliances that "about 95% describe themselves as revolutionaries".

About 95% of these SAs' make-up is the SWP and Militant, who between them still harbour such reactionary pro-imperialist outlooks as wanting to see Castro's Cuban Revolution overthrown; dismissing the Good Friday Agreement anti-imperialist achievement by the Irish national-liberation struggle as "failed Green terrorism"; damning with faint praise the seizure of half of southern Colombia by the FARC communist guerrillas; refusing to call for British imperialism's defeat in the Falklands War; telling the working class that voting for Blairism was progress compared to Thatcherism/Majorism; refusing to call for NATO imperialism's defeat in its fascist-blitzkrieg-on-Serbia conspiracy behind the lunatic notion that some genuine Kosovo-Albanian self-determination would be easily, quickly, peacefully, and usefully achieved (within this Balkans powder-keg for further unending Western warmongering and neocolonial intrigues); backing the CIA/Vatican 'Solidarnosc' counter-revolution to the hilt, led by the Pilsudski fascist Lech Walesa, and calling it "rank-and-file socialism"; etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

These are rabid anti-communists, and as such are also rabid counter-revolutionaries. Their instinctive petty-bourgeois hostility to the dictatorship of the proletariat has nothing whatever in common with the albeit ultimately reactionary inability of the Mensheviks, SRs, and anarchists to understand Leninist science or support it. The anti-Leninism of today is a 100% deliberate conscious turning away from the dictatorship of the proletariat and all of its epoch-making historical implications, as represented by the 73 years of the Soviet workers state and its socialist camp, and by the unprecedented international Cold War propaganda brainwashing the world was then subjected to by the terrified Western bourgeoisie, a fear of the workers state which the petty-bourgeois SWP and Militant, of the Socialist Alliance, fully share.

As well as sharing stated revolutionary goals, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks are also a profoundly different historical issue to this SA lash-up of sectarian Trot anti-communists in Britain because of the shared RSDLP experience of openly acknowledged and spelled-out deep differences, but also attempted agreed mechanisms for resolving those differences. The present treacherous Trot philistinism in Britain knows absolutely nothing of international communist discipline or of Marxist polemical discipline. The vilest anti-communist propaganda stunts, plus a lofty style of refusing to even acknowledge criticism, let alone be willing to polemicise with it, fearful that their own supporters could no longer be kept in the dark, - are the reactionary methods beloved by the gurus of the modern sectarian fake-'left', - as remote from and hostile to the methods of Marxist-Leninist science as it is possible to be.

Opportunist squabbling for electoral office is all that these SAs really have in common. Since their inception, there has not been one single attempt to give a united lead to the working class in response to any latest imperialist warmongering provocation or counter-revolutionary threat to the international proletariat. Western reaction is currently holding the ring for the systematic Zionist-imperialist slaughter of the current struggle by the Palestinian people for national-liberation, - but not one word can the Socialist Alliance movement (supposedly representing the imperialism-exploited working class of Britain) say about it, for example. Why so utterly useless? Not just because the SA movement 'has not had time yet to get its act together on questions of international anti-imperialist solidarity'.

Far more fundamentally degrading factors are involved. Firstly even the most willing SA solidarity with international anti-imperialist struggle would be utterly useless because this 'Alliance' hoax could never aspire to the scientific Leninist definition of international class-solidarity, the stepping up of workers’ own struggle to overthrow their own local bourgeois-imperialist tyranny. The SAs have no such shared revolutionary aim; therefore there can be no such worthwhile declarations of international anti-imperialist solidarity.

Secondly, this SA fake-'left' swamp actually has an unwritten agreement to not pursue attempted clarification of major political questions at all, - so that there should not be any major public falling-out when a failure to agree was eventually inevitably reached, - thus preserving the electorally-useful fraud of 'workers unity' for a little while longer.

Farcically, some of the most 'left'-posturing of these SA opportunists particularly like to boast (foreseeing criticism of SA embarrassing agnosticism on the major political questions of the day) about their 'weekly exposure of the SA's obvious limitations', etc, stressing especially their support for the 'full freedom for open criticism and factional rights' that the Alliance movement supposedly stands for.

These are utterly pointless boasts. Since the SAs don't represent any coherent line on any major political position, then there is not much to exercise 'full freedom for open criticism and factional rights' over in the first place. And these fundamental ideological and organisational flaws in this joke 'workers unity' are, of course, the one thing which these 'left' SA opportunists make certain of always keeping totally silent about.

"The age of the sect is dead" declares the fake-'left' propaganda for this anti-communist reactionary 'Socialist Alliance' fraud. But it is these 'left' posturers’ pretence that the SAs already have a 'revolutionary programme' which is the real sectarianism, (which defines a subjective-idealist clinging together by guru-led petty-bourgeois groupies obliged to cultivate perpetual amnesia to obliterate the wrong analyses of the world continuously being produced, and to ignore the methods of Marxist polemical science completely, when it comes to criticism they cannot handle.) In their present form, these 'Socialist Alliance' opportunist sectarians need each other, and deserve each other.

Perhaps the biggest fraud of all about the SAs is that they will 'inevitably go on to develop a revolutionary programme in due course', implying that workers who get gulled and sign up to the current deception, have nothing to fear in the long run.

Setting a more sly trap for the working class could hardly be imagined. There is nothing 'inevitable' about where majority working class opinion might initially end up, particularly in such a decadent fading imperialist dump of a set-up as the United Kingdom's bourgeois society, still suffering from its colonialism-corrupted trade-union/labour movement aristocracy. And the idea that these anti-communist Trot fake-'lefts' of SWP and Militant vintage are the enemies of this Labourist reaction, is complete nonsense. They have forever supported its pro-imperialist backwardness against the pro-communist alternatives in the world, determined on principle never to break from reactionary trade unionism, and therefore never seriously in favour of a break from Labourism.

At this moment, it is precisely the 'left Labourite' fraud which is making all the waves (such as they are) inside the 'Socialist Alliances' following an anti-Blair revolt by four councillors in Lancashire and the saved deposit by one of them in the Preston by-election. But as honest and well-meaning as doubtless these anti-Blairism protesters all are, the class-ideological stance involved is unmistakably that of 'left'-reformist pressure, - the well-worked-out graveyard of any serious hopes for a working class socialist movement since Labourism began. With no disrespect to the individuals concerned, or to their capacity (or anyone else's) to develop a grasp of Marxist-Leninist scientific understanding of an imperialist world in crisis which will write the future's history books for us, at the moment this form of 'anti-Blairism' is really worse than useless to the working class. Only the very stupid or the most wilfully gullible anti-communists among workers could have gone along with Blair's blatantly middle-class pro-imperialism from his very first mention as a potential new Labour leader. Blair is a lifelong careerist stooge for the monopoly bourgeoisie's big-business interests down to his farcical 'Christian' soul. To have continued 'believing in Blairism' for more than three years' bitter experience reflects either inexhaustibly sinister opportunism or else a positively dangerous light-mindedness in the Socialist Alliance's newly-acclaimed 'workers representatives'.

And the clear problem this all creates is not remotely addressed by saying that 'everyone can learn, everyone can change', or by accusations of 'academic Marxist elitism'. The Alliance is embracing 'left Labourism', not just uncritically, but with such eager enthusiasm that the worst can alone be feared. This embrace, as it stands, is 100% nothing but a marker for yet another 'left Labour' reformist fraud to be inflicted on the working class when this latest 'new enthusiasm' for Labour, - the Blairite 'revolution' electoral successes after 18 years of dismal failure, – peters out in disillusioned misery. The individuals involved are not the issue. The question is all about Blairism being ditched for....what exactly??? Actions speak louder than words, and the SAs had only the mildest 'left reformist' electoral programme to start with.

But now they rush to lay down the red carpet for the first 'left Labour' councillors to come their way, totally unreconstructed. The difficulty is not what the 'Independent Labour/Socialist Alliance' compromise candidate might have done and said in Parliament had this 'united socialist' electoral appeal pulled more than its 5.6% at the by-election. That would be of concern, but almost irrelevant compared to the everlasting damage that could be caused to the working class by pretending that the exploitation and war-threat problems posed by the greatest imperialist-system crisis in world history have immediately been solved, or put on the road towards solution, because a few Lancashire Labour councillors have finally begun to realise what a dreadful reactionary fraud on the working class is Blairism. What a dreadfully reactionary fraud on the working class is the whole history of Labourism, and particularly of 'left Labourism', - that would be more like a suitable first step in a thousand or more steps of dramatic enlightenment which the working class will need to make to seriously be in a position to take on and defeat imperialist crisis in the coming years. But the wretched 'Socialist Alliance' fraud cannot manage even that first lowly step.

Far worse than that, the overwhelming majority of the present specialist sectarian Trot activists, who make up the petty-bourgeois 'Socialist Alliances', will not wish to make even that first step of grasping what a perpetual fraud 'left Labourism' has always been and remains to this day, - totally and permanently disarming the working class from even the barest glimmer of understanding of the real revolutionary nature of the actual world and actual class struggle that workers really live in.

The noisy attacks on Scargillism's rival non-revolutionary 'challenge' to Blairism should fool no one either. The SAs and the SLP are both in the identical same boat of pretending that 'left reformist' pressure is going to win mass working-class support of such a kind as to eventually achieve socialism, - just like that! It is the most naïvely treacherous nonsense ever to be inflicted on the working class. These are just rival sectarianisms, clinging together in philistine fear and ignorance of seriously revolutionary perspectives and dialogue becoming the essential question facing the working class, and requiring some clear vision and honest answers about endless past reactionary propaganda or dodging the issue on the real historical challenge of communist revolution.

For different autocratic reasons of petty bourgeois background-politics, either in Trot anti-communism or labour-aristocracy trade-unionism, - neither fake anti-Labour sectarian movement is at all keen to encourage Leninist science, the attempt daily to educate the working class in deducing the inevitable world-revolutionary perspectives (to meet the incurably explosive international imperialist-system crisis), based on the spontaneous conflicts, revolts, and stuttering understanding going on all round the planet. Workers' independent revolutionary consciousness is viewed with the gravest suspicion or seen as the greatest threat. Both SA and SLP sectarianism hope to get by just through soothing the working class on the doorstep with a 'left reformist' electoral promise or two, and with grandiose posturing as 'the real socialist alternative to vote for', etc, etc. This is so not the explosive revolutionary world that the massive, relentless, incurable imperialist economic crisis is creating for society, that these deliberate electoral-promise con tricks on workers doorsteps by these quite staggeringly inefficient and bureaucratic fake-'left' museum pieces, seem scarcely real in their deluded sectarianism. 

Revolutionary crisis is all that capitalism has on offer. A massive debate about all previous revolutionary crises, and how they were resolved, and what went wrong, and how earlier mistakes need to be avoided, - is the next major struggle on the agenda, to be sparked off by an ever increasing spontaneous revolutionary tide all round the world. About the most treacherous service to the working class is just to ignore it in order to get on with some more 'basic organisational work'. Organisation for what? To provide a dumbed-down army for the next 'left Labour' mountebank to sweep the field with more facile 'reformist' promises. Without revolutionary theory, there will be no revolutionary practice (Lenin).

The permanently constipated SLP leadership has not enlightened the working class much yet on the explosive front-line developments in one of the hottest areas of insoluble world imperialist-system crisis, but the authentic voice of museum-Stalinist sclerosis, Harpal Brar's Lalkar, has fallen head-first into the usual revisionist quagmire, still creeping along in the mere shadow of Moscow's already failed and abandoned 'historical compromises with imperialism' which was never anything but the most lunatic anti-revolutionary treachery to the working class. One of Stalinism's foulest crimes and most ridiculous theoretical nonsenses was to go along with the United-Nations-approved colonisation of Palestine to find a home for the degenerate and doomed Zionist-imperialist mentality, creating a permanent armed stooge for Western domineering interests over the whole of the oil-rich Middle East, - a colonial idiocy which simply cannot last, whether UN-approved or not.

Here is Lalkar's updated betrayal of the Palestinian nation and their national home, Palestine, given away by the imperialist-dominated UN in 1947:

The Israeli-Palestinian problem can be solved, but on one condition, namely, that the justice of the Palestinian cause be recognised and the legitimate rights and claims of the Palestinian people be accepted. These are as follows: 

• The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, with an independent Palestinian state of their own, in the territories conquered and occupied by Israel during the June 1967 War;

• The right of the nearly 5 million refugees to return to their homes and land;

• The removal of all Zionist settlements from the Occupied Territories; and

• The handing over of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians to serve as the capital of an independent Palestine.

Without the fulfilment of these conditions there will be no peace in the area, for the Palestinians have made as many concessions as it was possible for them to make.

So in essence, the entire Zionist-imperialist colonisation of the Palestinian nation's homeland survives in Brar's permanently-crippled Stalinist-revisionist perspective (of everlasting peaceful coexistence between systems; peaceful roads to socialism; non-expansion of imperialist economies; 'good' imperialisms and 'bad' imperialisms; etc, etc all the old treacherous Moscow crap, culminating in the utterly appropriate self-liquidation in total confusion).

In such a non-revolutionary world only, can such fantasies as the survival of the Zionist colonisation of the Palestinian homeland (while the 6 million Palestinians dispossessed, still die a slow death in barbaric refugee camps or in resources-starved handkerchief-sized reservations inside a tiny percentage of their own former country) be seen as realistic.

In the real revolutionary world, inter-imperialist warmongering conflicts will soon be splitting and weakening Western imperialism in all directions, while conscious revolutionary struggle, far greater than even the colossal reach and impact of 1917 and post-1945 combined, will steadily sweep up the whole world in its influence and inspiration. The overwhelming majority of colonising Zionist settler/occupiers can either go back to New York, Los Angeles, Poland, or Russia where they belong, leaving the tiny handfuls of genuine Jewish immigrants to live in peace under a Palestinian socialist state, or else they can perish defending their stolen illegitimate colonial territory. The Lalkar colonisation-recognition 'compromise solution' is a complete and reactionary nonsense.

It is pointless for museum-Stalinism apologists to 'explain' that Lalkar 'clearly does understand things' because of these further thoughts Brar tacks on at the end:

There is no coherent, rational or historical rationale for the existence of this artificial creation of imperialism. In the end, only a secular Palestinian state, in which Jews and Arabs live as equals, with neither side oppressing the other, is the proper solution. That, however, can only come about through separation and the creation, as a preliminary to it, of an independent Palestinian state, side by side and next to Israel.

Far from rescuing Lalkar's wretched revisionist, anti-revolutionary, permanent peaceful-coexistence-within-imperialism nonsense, this addendum merely confirms its defeatist foolishness. Out of what pattern of history could this first stage "preliminary independent Palestinian state, side by side and next to Israel" emerge? How is this strange world to be contrived in which the Zionist permanent colonisation aggression, which alone has allowed 'Israel' to survive and flourish, is going to accept "Jews and Arabs living as equals in a secular Palestinian state"?? How could Zionist imperialism still remain Zionist imperialism and yet remove all Zionist settlements from the occupied Territories"?? How physically can "5 million Palestinian refugees return to their homes and land" and yet 'Israel' still exist in Brar's interim 'solution' which has no other territory to exist on other than the 'homes and land' that the 5 million returning Palestinian refugees would need to reoccupy???? And what is a 'proper' solution? The unreal notion of happy Jews and Arabs sharing Palestine reveals the same utopian voluntarist nonsense of Stalin's deranged revisionist perspective that imperialist economic expansion was at an end and that therefore the historic international class struggle would be resolved by the West gradually accepting being overtaken by the socialist camp. Such artificially constructed 'proper' solutions belong to the realm of maudlin bureaucratic complacency and are a profound insult to Marxist-Leninist science and an intolerable betrayal of the working-class interest.

This is all a hopeless muddle because of the untreated legacy of museum-Stalinist revisionism at its very worst, - (because of the crass revisionist nonsense that Stalin's leadership itself inflicted on the international working class), - over agreeing to the imbecility of a Zionist colonial state on the usurped Palestinian homeland in the first place.

Only the growing Arab willingness for revolutionary struggle will force Zionism back. That growing determination and consciousness cannot be understood as just a one-off in a tiny part of the Near East; in reality it could only be a feature of a worldwide revolutionary advance against imperialism. Having established revolutionary upheaval as a universal phenomenon of the crisis-ridden imperialist system itself, what sort of strange, unhealthy, non-Marxist, anti-historical mentality then envisages this revolutionary overthrow of imperialism contentedly stopping with a halfway-house stalemate against one of the most relentlessly vicious and aggressive counter-revolutionary agencies (but an immediately vulnerable one) in the whole history of colonial imperialism?? Only the utterly sick blind alley of the 20th century in Stalinism's grotesque theoretical revisionism, undermining Leninism, and self-liquidating the Soviet workers state and the socialist camp.

In a muddled thrashing around to try to escape the contradictions of Lalkar's halfway-house reformist delusions, Brar correctly points optimistically to splits in the Zionist ranks which might help bring these reforms about, but his approving quotation from the FT as proof in fact, of course, gives exactly the wrong historical direction to this imperialist crisis:

In the words of the Financial Times, written just before the outbreak of the second intifada, Israel's... "pace of fragmentation has accelerated as the threat from the Arab world, so long a unifying factor, recedes" (18 September, 2000).

The threat from the Arab world is doing the exact opposite, but Lalkar's head is so far up its own posterior trying to make something positive out of Stalinism's catastrophic reformist halfway-house revisionist nonsense that Brar fails to notice this bourgeois-imperialist wishful thinking from this admittedly usually more objective voice of finance-capital.

All this is just dreadful Stalinist corruption of Marxism's predictive explanations for analysing the essential revolutionary pattern of history. To protect its rotten Stalinist past in one direction, and its opportunist creeping behind Scargill's 'left-reformist' SLP in another, this Lalkar chaotic description of Middle East developments deliberately refuses to bring out their international anti-imperialist revolutionary essence and message, inflicting on workers understanding instead some utterly half-arsed reformist non-solution, - teaching the working class absolutely nothing about the real movement in the international balance of class forces, which is the main point of analysing the Zionist-Palestinian conflict in the first place. As Lalkar itself declares, to give it its due:

Thus it is clear that with the latest developments, US policy in Palestine, and in the wider Middle-East region, is ending up in smoke  – delivering a blow to the imperialist-contrived status quo and stability.
But the wretched Stalinist connection only wants to see this in terms of a 'controlled' blow to imperialist stability, exactly in line with Stalin's utterly bent vision (expressed in his 1952 writing on The economic problems of socialism and in Moscow's entire international stance of discouraging revolutionary perspectives in favour of patiently waiting for "no longer expanding economic imperialism" to fall behind the socialist camp's economic advance, thus making the 'peaceful road to socialism' possible everywhere in time). Lalkar is still trying to make the working class pay the price of that treacherous revisionist nonsense and total confusion. Build Leninism. Spread the EPSR.

The entire anti-Marxist swamp purveys the crass philosophical perception that political perspectives and agitation should proceed from the 'normal' or 'actual' conditions and problems facing workers, taking slow capitalist-society evolution and argued-for 'left reformist' changes as the 'normal' progress of history, with revolutionary upheaval periods only very, very exceptional, and very, very occasional. In this frame of mind, the entire fake-'left' is always thinking about 'what positions it has gained'; or 'what membership applications have rolled in'; or 'how the percentage vote has gone up'; etc, etc. But never - 'Have we succeeded in correctly analysing for the working class the latest significant developments in the imperialist-economic system's world revolutionary crisis?'.

For Marxist science, capitalism is primarily just another phase of unending revolutionary class war. Its 'norm' is upheaval.

Its 'peaceful evolution' periods are just a complete deception on the working class to lull it into permanent anti-revolutionary stupor, off its guard. But without the fake-'left' of Trot and Stalinist anti-Marxists to lure the working class into 'left reformist' electoral complacency around the 'Socialist Alliances' or the SLP, for example, - this bourgeois ideological deception could never be got away with.
EPSR

	World Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles)

Trimble's 'decommissioning' excuse for Agreement-wrecking suspension of All-Ireland ministerial council ignores the IRA's 5-year ceasefire which alone has made a 'peace deal' possible
	
	Full text of the IRA statement

"The leadership of Óglaigh na h-Éireann is committed to a just and lasting peace.

In recent years we have engaged in an unprecedented series of substantial and historic initiatives to enhance the peace process.

The record shows that we have honoured every commitment we have made.

In this context, and despite the abuse of the peace process by those who persist with the aim of defeating the IRA and Irish republicanism, and the obvious failure of the British Government to honour its obligations under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and the commitments made at Hillsborough, the leadership of the IRA has decided:

■ To honour all commitments entered into by us and to underpin the peace process. ALL undertakings by us were premised clearly on the speedy and full implementation of the commitments made by the two governments on 5 May and the commitments made under the Good Friday Agreement.

■ The British Government has thus far not honoured its undertakings. Despite this the IRA leadership has decided that the re-inspection of a number of arms dumps will be repeated to confirm that our weapons remain secure.

In many ways this re-inspection is more important than the first inspection.

■ We have also decided to resume discussions with the IICD when we are satisfied that the peace process will be advanced by those discussions. On 25 June we re-established contact with the Commission. Because the British Government has yet to honour its undertakings, we have not resumed discussions with the IICD. Neither have we broken off contact.

■ These actions announced by us today represent clear and irrefutable evidence of the IRA's commitment to a just and equitable peace settlement.

The significance of these decisions should not be underestimated or undervalued, not least because of developments since another initiative by us resulted in the political institutions being established on 2 December after 18 months of impasse.

Less than three months later the British Government suspended these institutions. This was despite the IICD February report which welcomed our belief that the 'state of perpetual crisis' can be averted and that the issue of arms can be resolved.

The IICD recognised that the IRA provides no threat to the peace process. It also accepted the importance of the IRA's contribution and support for the process as issues of considerable significance for peace.

The IICD reported that all of this held out the real prospect of an agreement which would enable it to fulfil the substance of its mandate.

Despite the bad faith involved in the British Government's suspension of the institutions, within weeks the Sinn Féin leadership put to us and to the two governments ideas that had the potential to overcome this crisis.

Following this on 5 May the British and Irish Governments issued a joint letter and a joint statement setting out commitments by the two governments to the full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement by June 2000.

The British Government publicly and privately committed itself to deal with a range of matters including human rights, equality, justice, demilitarisation and policing.

Our commitment to a just and permanent peace was underlined once again when we announced our initiative of 6 May.

We said that we will initiate a process that will completely and verifiably put IRA arms beyond use. We explained the context for this:

"The full implementation, on a progressive and irreversible basis, by the two governments, especially the British Government, of what they have agreed will provide a political context, in an enduring political process, with the potential to remove the causes of conflict and in which Irish republicans and unionists can, as equals, pursue our respective political objectives peacefully. "

And importantly we announced that we were prepared to put in place a confidence-building measure to confirm that our weapons remained secure. This was widely welcomed and recognised as a huge and historically unprecedented departure by us.

Finally we committed ourselves to resume contact with the IICD and to further discussions with the Commission on the basis of the IRA leadership's commitment to resolving the issue of arms.

On Monday 26 June in a public statement we confirmed that the commitments made by us on 6 May had been fulfilled. At that point the British government had not delivered on its commitments.

Now months later the British Government has yet to honour its commitments.

The IRA are doing our best to enhance the peace process. This is not our responsibility alone. Others also must play their part.

The political responsibility for advancing the current situation and making progress rests with the two governments, especially the British Government. "

	World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
	(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

The cowardly weakness of Blair's Labour Party in failing to stand up to British colonial establishment reaction has forced Sinn Féin to the last 'legal' testing-to-destruction of the GFA

SINN Féin President Gerry Adams has accused the British Government of lacking the political will to resolve the current crisis in the Peace Process caused by David Trimble's discriminatory actions against Sinn Féin Ministers. In his strongest attack yet on Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, Adams said that he had little confidence in the British Government's management of the Peace Process and that Sinn Féin was taking 'imminent' legal action to challenge the party's exclusion from all-Ireland Ministerial Council meetings.

The Sinn Féin leader said he had been involved in lengthy and detailed discussions with the two governments, which included meetings and phone calls with Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair, as well as with senior officials from the two governments.

"For the past twelve days I have been trying to ascertain whether or not the British government has the political will to resolve this crisis," said Adams. "In my view the British government at this time is more concerned with its management of unionism and with pandering to rejectionists within its own system, than it is with the full and proper implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and of the commitment it entered into in May at Hillsborough.

"The British Secretary of State claims that he does not endorse Mr. Trimble's position but yet he refuses to intervene. This is at odds with his record so far, when he abused his power at the beginning of the year, unilaterally and illegally, to collapse the institutions and more recently in contradictions of the Good Friday Agreement when he ordered the flying of the Union flag."

David Trimble is in breach of his obligations under the Good Friday Agreement and Peter Mandelson is refusing to use his authority to defend the Agreement, the press conference was told.

Trimble had outlined his game plan in a comprehensive way in a letter to the UUC delegates when he set out his objectives as increasing pressure progressively on republicans and nationalists by creating a crisis around the Executive and Assembly, to achieve the suspension of the Agreement and to place responsibility for this on republicans.

"Sinn Féin is not prepared to tolerate this emasculation of the Agreement by the First Minister nor acquiesce in the progressive termination of the All-Ireland Ministerial Council," said Adams. "We have tried to resolve this matter politically. We will continue in contact with both governments, but I have little confidence in the British government's management of this process."

"I am also very conscious that the policing debate is drawing to a conclusion and that it appears the British government, despite its protestations to the contrary, has overturned the recommendations of its own commission on policing. Only yesterday, another member of the Patten Commission attacked the British Police Bill and accused the British government of having "gutted" the Patten recommendations.

"The British government has a statutory obligation to act as a guarantor of the Good Friday Agreement. The responsibilities and obligations of both governments in this respect derive from the British-Irish Agreement, from the Good Friday Agreement itself, from the All Ireland referendum vote and from votes in the British parliament

	"The British government has a responsibility to effectively address the threat to the Agreement posed by David Trimble's disenfranchisement of the two Sinn Féin ministers, as well as his other demands," said Adams. "The Irish government has a similar responsibility. It has attended to this in a responsible way."

The Good Friday Agreement is not a northern issue, Adams told the conference; every citizen on this island has a stake in it. "The people are the real guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement, whether unionist, nationalist, republican, loyalist or people without any party politics, to defend the Agreement," said Adams. 

Those who seek to prevent the changes involved in the Agreement would not prevail, said the Sinn Féin leader, the Good Friday Agreement will be judged, and is being judged, on whether it delivers or not. The Agreement itself cannot deliver change, said Adams, it is a charter or a vehicle for change and it needs to be driven forwards to achieve its potential..

"Sinn Féin is not giving up," said Adams. "Our decision to take legal action, despite the lack of confidence by nationalists and republicans in the legal and judicial system here, is an indication of our grave dissatisfaction at how this British government, which promised so much has pandered to a unionist veto."

The people who voted for the Good Friday Agreement won't accept "second class rule and second class citizenship", Adams told a press conference in Belfast.

Announcing the imminent legal action, Adams said David Trimble's refusal to nominate Sinn Féin Ministers Bairbre de Brun and Martin McGuinness had disenfranchised the two Sinn Féin ministers.

"Mr Trimble has fractured the all-Ireland leg of the institutions and commenced a process to collapse the. Good Friday Agreement," said Adams. "Following the Ulster Unionist Council meeting, Sinn Féin's Ard Comhairle authorised us to initiate court action in defence of our rights and those of our electorate."

	World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
	(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

SINN Féin Equality spokesperson Michelle Gildernew, has welcomed the Belfast High Court decision last Thursday, 9 November, granting Sinn Féin Newry and Armagh Assembly member Conor Murphy leave to apply for a judicial review of Peter Mandelson's decision to issue regulations on the flying of flags over government buildings.

Gildernew, Assembly member for Fermanagh/South Tyrone, said: "The flying of flags at government, buildings is a matter for the Executive and Assembly, to be determined by consensus in line with principles agreed in the Good Friday Agreement. It is not a matter for Peter Mandelson. 

"The Agreement recognises the sensitivity in the use of symbols and 	emblems and, in particular, the need in creating the new institutions to ensure that symbols are used in a manner which promotes mutual respect rather than division.

"The decision by the High Court to grant Sinn Féin leave to apply for a judicial review is evidence that Peter Mandelson has a legal case to answer over his decision  to issue flag regulations when the Executive has yet to conclude on the issue.

"Instead of allowing agreement to be reached based on  consensus in the Executive. and Assembly, Peter Mandelson proceeded to exercise powers he said he would not use except as a last resort. He did this shortly before the political institutions were restored in May and, significantly, only days, before a confidence vote in David Trimble by his party.

"Peter Mandelson has proceeded on a biased basis. This is illustrated by the introduction of the Flags Order in advance of an Ulster Unionist Council meeting in May and the flag regulations now being introduced in advance of yet another UUC meeting this autumn. This is despite the Executive and Assembly not  concluding on this issue.

"While Peter Mandelson says he had regard to the Good Friday Agreement, I do not believe that he gave any or any sufficient  consideration to its meaning. The promotion of parity of esteem, equality and inclusion has taken second place in Peter Mandelson's priorities to shore up the party political position of .David Trimble."

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Colonialism's stooges in trouble as its police misdeeds get reprieved.

ONE of the independent members of the Patten Commission, Dr Clifford Shearing, has comprehensively denounced the Police Bill, which has just undergone its third reading in the House of Lords.

In an article for The Guardian on 15 November, Shearing, a South African born criminologist at the University of Toronto, argues forcefully that the bill "dismantles the foundations on which the Patten Commission plan was built" and that the "core elements" of its report "have been undermined everywhere".

Focusing on just some of the huge number of discrepancies between the Patten report and the bill, Shearing says that the new legislation rejects the concept of policing as "a collective responsibility" and instead "reflects the limited conception of policing [which] the Patten report sought to transcend".

He is particularly critical of the bill's proposals in respect of the creation, funding and powers of the new policing board, which, he comments, would be such "in name only". The Patten Report envisaged that the new policing board would have genuine powers to "require the chief constable to report on any issue pertaining to the performance of his functions or those of the police service". This bill, says Shearing, "completely eviscerates these proposals" and "would allow the chief constable to question almost any attempt by the board to require a report or get behind a report they have received".

The bill's provisions also allow for the Secretary of State to over-rule any decision by the board to request an independent inquiry into any aspect of policing or police conduct. This provision, comments Shearing, makes "it possible to hide and obscure" the truth.

These already weakened powers would be further undermined by the fact that they are not retrospective. Past misdeeds by the RUC, both collectively and by individual officers, will continue to go unpunished; there is no proper system for rooting out serving officers who have been responsible for human rights violations. The powers of the newly appointed policing Ombudsman, Nuala 0'Loan, are also already severely curtailed. Like the proposed policing board, she will not have meaningful, unrestricted access to RUC documents and what authority she does exercise will also not apply retrospectively.

Shearing concludes by stating unequivocally that the bill "does not fulfil the hopes and vision of the Belfast Agreement. It is not a new beginning. It will not serve the people of Northern Ireland".

This is not the first time that Dr Shearing has voiced his deep unease about the progress of the police bill. At a public meeting in Toronto some weeks ago (An Phoblacht, 12 October), he said that he had been "taken aback" at the British Government's failure to recognise the crucial elements of Patten. On the question of the name and symbols of the new police service, he insisted that these must be neutral in order to encourage nationalists to join it. If these symbols remained aligned to unionism - as the bill proposes nationalists would be as disinclined as ever to join making the new service "worthless".

Dr  Shearing's most recent criticisms come after a host of other condemnations of the bill. In June this year, for example, Professor Brendan O'Leary, co-author of Policing Northern Ireland and also writing in The Guardian, was scathing about the bill, referring to it as a "mockery", a "travesty", and "almost a parody" of the Patten report. O'Leary called the bill "a fundamental breach of faith, Perfidious Britannia in caricature. It represents Old Britain, it was drafted by the forces of conservatism, for the forces of conservatism; the bill will ensure... that the RUC remains unreformed".

This was written when Peter Mandelson still had the opportunity to rectify what O'Leary calls, "this disgrace ".He chose not to do so, opting instead, in his quest to ensure the political survival of David Trimble, for only the most insubstantial of amendments to the bill, which did not address any of the criticisms levelled at it. This policy has now reached its logical conclusion where, as Clifford Shearing points out: "Patten has not been cherry-picked it has been gutted."

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

VINCENT McKENNA was led away to Mountjoy Jail this week after being convicted of sexual abuse against his daughter. It was an infamous end to an infamous career of a man branded by the family he persecuted as a serial liar and control freak.

Born in Aughnacloy in 1963, McKenna claimed that he joined the IRA as a youth but after becoming disillusioned turned into a campaigner for peace. It was a lie, of course, but music to the ears of the British securocrats who promoted his rise into the public domain. For them, the self-created label of "reformed terrorist" gave McKenna's anti-republican agenda all the more resonance.

His pro-British agenda guaranteed not only his public profile but also funding for the groups to which he was attached.

As a student at Queens University in 1998, McKenna grabbed the headlines when he published a survey that he claimed showed the majority of residents along the nationalist Lower Ormeau Road did not object to Orange parades. It was a blatant fabrication, challenged by the residents and rejected by Queens.

Despite McKenna's questionable credibility, as a spokesperson for Families Against  Intimidation and Terror, he enjoyed wide access to the media and politicians. His statistics were routinely invoked by politicians in Dublin, Belfast and Westminster. An international media figure, McKenna even appeared on the prestigious CBS 60 Minutes programme in the US.

In May 1999, McKenna left FAIT to establish his own Northern Ireland Human Rights Bureau. In September, McKenna's anti-republican agenda found expression at a rally in the Ulster Hall against the Patten Report on policing, where he appeared on stage.

McKenna was no more a former IRA Volunteer than he was a human rights campaigner. McKenna was an ambitious and ruthless manipulator of the truth who sought to promote himself more than the causes he championed.

McKenna dreamed of political office but the seeds of his downfall were already germinating. A month after his appearance at the Ulster Hall, it was revealed that he had been investigated by the Gardai in connection with child sex-abuse allegations.

McKenna claimed he was being subjected to a smear campaign and an "onslaught of intimidation" from republicans. He claimed his life had been threatened seven times, that he had been assaulted twice and republicans had bombed his home three times. In the end, however, the lie became too big to sustain.

Speaking after her father's conviction, Sorcha McKenna said the truth had finally come out. "I can never put it behind me but it's good that people now realise what he has done." McKenna is expected to be transferred from Mountjoy to Arbour Hill in Dublin, which houses a special unit for sex offenders.

Meanwhile, in a statement to An Phoblacht, the IRA has re-stated its position that McKenna was never a member of the IRA, refuting media reports stating otherwise.

The short statement from the leadership reads as follows: "In reporting Vincent McKenna's conviction for serious sexual abuse, several media outlets referred to him as a former member of the IRA. The leadership of Óglaigh na h-Éireann states categorically that Vincent McKenna has never been a member of our organisation."