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No reset for the Home Office
When I worked at the international telephone exchange in London (I’m obviously talking about when there were such things, so in the early 1980s) we had to sign the Official Secrets Act. We signed it when we joined and we signed it when we left. When I left, Mr Ignacek, a divisional supervisor, told me: “You have to sign the Act again.”
“What for?” I asked.
“So you don’t blab!” he said.
“Blab?” I said. “What about?!” (We were only a telephone exchange. I wasn’t John Le Carré.)
“Anything,” Iggy said. “You can’t even tell them the colour of the paint on the bloody walls!”
All that was ridiculous and funny. The story (below) of how the Official Secrets Act is being used today to cover up cruelty and ill-treatment of asylum seekers is not funny at all. It’s shameful. And yes, Priti Patel is overseeing it, no doubt with her trademark enthusiasm for bullying way out in front. But, as I said before (see previous two blogs), abuse of asylum seekers goes back through the decades and was perpetrated by governments of all shades. Why did Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett introduce the policy of separating the children of refused asylum seekers from their parents and putting them in care in order to force their terrified parents to take the family back to their dangerous home country? The Head of Asylum Policy at the Home Office in 2006, Rod McLean, told me it was because he wanted to prove to the tabloid press that he was not a “soft touch” when it came to asylum. When I told MacLean that the Refugee Council had said this policy was “not the mark of a civilised society”, he sighed, shrugged his shoulders and said: “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
And so it goes on. In our name. We have to do something about it. Get involved in one of the support groups mentioned in the article, send emails to MPs and ministers, raise the issue in your union branch, invent ways of protesting that are safe during the pandemic. We shouldn’t leave people to the non-existent mercy of our politicians and their civil servants.
I’ve been away
Meanwhile, back on the ground, in a place that may soon officially become “foreign parts”
– and before you ask, no, it isn’t foreign parts as far as I’m concerned –
meanwhile, I say, life and struggles go on against all the odds. According to today’s Libération, some 200 emergency hospital staff met at the weekend in 33 towns in France. It was a strike movement that has affected 65 of these services across France. At the weekend they decided on a day of action in Paris on 6 June. They have a platform of demands, and they are familiar ones:
- stop the closure of hospital beds;
- raise pay levels;
- increase staffing levels
The national strike committee comprises this group, representatives from various regions of France, plus a united front of trade unions comprising the CGT, Force Ouvrière and the SUD (I don’t know what the last one is). There have been a number of strikes in different places. Dr Francis Braun, President of the Emergency Services of France, has called for a half-hour stoppage today across France. “We have reached the end,” he said. “I have never known anything like this before. The services are at breaking point, saturation point, the point of rupture. Rarely have I seen such stoppages of work.”
This is where we will have to head too, in our own austerity-driven crisis. We need a similar movement of resistance, in solidarity with French and other EU workers. Such solidarity will be more difficult if we leave the EU. But it will have to be done. Or we’re buggered.
Les urgences, entre surchauffe et abattement
https://www.liberation.fr/france/2019/05/27/les-urgences-entre-surchauffe-et-abattement_1729921
EU 1: Thinking aloud about some of the questions: workers’ rights
I haven’t decided how I’m going to vote in the EU referendum. If I vote to leave I will be joining a ramshackle bunch of characters including Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and George Galloway. Shouting with them from the sidelines, as Andrew Raunsley points out in today’s Observer (see link (1) below), are Marine le Pen and Vladimir Putin. And if the No camp wins we might even end up with Boris Johnson as prime minister.
All that is nearly enough to send me into the Yes camp!
But I’m also horrified by the supporters of continued membership who, one way or another, have got us where we are today. Raunsley’s list includes
“the chancellor, foreign secretary and home secretary, most of the rest of the cabinet, the great majority of senior figures from the opposition parties, the bulk of big business and the trade unions, the governor of the Bank of England, the president of the United States and the leader of every European country that anyone might conceivably have heard of.”
That’s almost enough to send me into the No camp!
However, it’s not about lists of clowns, bankers, politicians, or other Very Important People. It is, as Tony Benn always insisted, about “the issues”. Take, for instance, the question of workers’ rights. Would it be better for workers’ rights if we stayed in or if we left?
Let me suggest one argument for staying in. Many unions are saying that workers’ rights will be better protected if we stay in. But I notice the biggest French union, the CGT, says that the latest “reforms” of the Code du Travail announced by the French government will take France back to the 19th century (see link (2) below). And this in a France firmly entrenched in the EU. This game of “reforms” is the game all governments want to play, and no country’s workers are safe, and this suggests that there are no automatic guarantees of workers’ rights in the EU and that whether we’re in or out we’ll have to defend the rights we fought for. M. Martinez is calling on French trade unionists to do that now in France. So the argument for staying in to protect workers’ rights doesn’t seem to be a particularly strong one.
Unless, of course, we add M. Martinez’s element of workers taking action to defend their rights. Then, if we stayed in, it would be easier to join them and any others across the EU doing the same. Wouldn’t Brexit leave British workers weaker against Cameron, and other workers in Europe weaker against their own governments? I think solidarity is better than isolation. And perhaps solidarity across the EU could change it to the advantage of workers beyond the wildest dreams that Cameron has of changing it to the advantage of his rich, arrogant, corporate buddies.
That’s my first thought, anyway. More to come as the campaigning goes on.
(1) Andrew Raunsley’s article: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/21/eu-refendum-tory-party-uk-at-stake
(2) Article in Libération: http://www.liberation.fr/france/2016/02/19/martinez-le-nouveau-code-du-travail-un-retour-au-xixe-siecle_1434633
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