Party President’s New Year Message

In his New Year’s message for 2022, Workers Party President Cllr. Ted Tynan focusses on poverty, austerity, the threats posed by the privatisation of public services and utilities, the impact of the housing crisis, deepening sectarianism and the continued absence of a Bill of Rights.

“We live in difficult times”, he said, pointing to the “continuing effects of Covid-19, heightened by decades of austerity during which millions of workers have been exposed to risk in the pursuit of profit”

The ‘working poor’

Highlighting the ongoing effects of hardship and need, the Party President said “Hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland live in poverty and many of those are the so-called “working poor” unable to live and feed their families although in employment. Women, in particular, often have to work in low-paid precarious jobs.

 This is compounded, he said by “a significant decline in living standards, a situation set to deteriorate, as the cost of living continues to increase and as wages continue to decline and social benefits are under attack”.

Privatisation

“The capitalist class continues to pursue its relentless agenda of privatisation. Increasingly, important sectors of the economy: education, healthcare, energy, transport, communications and state infrastructure are targeted for transfer from state ownership to private control. The vitally important health and social care sectors are under-funded and under persistent attack”, he said.

Sectarianism and a Bill of Rights

Speaking specifically about Northern Ireland, Cllr Tynan said “…the demand for a dedicated Bill of Rights, despite decades of political work, has yet to be conceded. Sectarianism runs deep though public and private life in Northern Ireland. It is institutionalised in the apparatus of government. It can only be tackled by a comprehensive campaign against sectarianism on all fronts.

The various nationalist forces, orange and green, are determined to press forward with their divisive agendas and are prepared to sacrifice the principle of workers’ unity and class struggle to serve their communal ends”. 

Climate change and international issues

Addressing the need for climate change he reiterated that this can only be achieved through a change in the economic, political systems.

Cllr Tynan singled out two international issues for special mention: the ongoing provocation and aggression against the Cuban people and the cruel siege and blockade of Gaza.

Class struggle

“We recognise the continuing importance of the class struggle and a united working class … and the construction of a socialist world where the working class controls its own future”, the Party president concluded.

Health and Care a Human Right

Nicola Campbell

As health and care services across Northern Ireland become stretched beyond capacity, Workers Party Newry and Armagh spokesperson, Nicola Campbell, has called for an ‘immediate reversal of the policy of bed closures’

“In the last ten years the number of hospital beds in Northern Ireland has dropped by 10%. In the Belfast area, where all the major regional services are based, the figure is a staggering 20%”. Nicola said.

“Locally, the number of hospital beds available in the Southern Trust dropped to a low of 813 a few years ago. That figure has improved slightly but is still well short of the 997 beds available in this area a decade ago”.

“This did not happen by chance. It is the result of successive Ministers for Health and the Assembly cutting back on health service funding and investment. The outcome is that people are dying while they wait for inpatient treatment. In the past five years that figure is in the region of 22,000 deaths”, stated Nicola

“Everyone should have the right to treatment and care. It should be free at the point of delivery and should be centrally funded and centrally planned. These principles are being increasingly undermined and put at risk.

Health and care is a human right and the only way to ensure that our NHS is not run into the ground and then handed over to private companies is for the right to public health and care services to be enshrined in a Northern Ireland Bill of Rights that will provide protection and guarantees for the service, for staff and for citizens”, Nicola concluded.

Enterprise Zone Failure

The news that Northern Ireland’s only Enterprise Zone (EZ), the Atlantic Link site, near Coleraine, has cost ratepayers £3m and attracted one tenant since it opened for business in 2017 is hardly a surprise.

A decade ago, in its response to  the UK Treasury consultation document on “rebalancing the Northern Ireland response economy”,  the Workers’ Party provided clear evidence that Enterprise Zones are an expensive waste of money and fail to create jobs.

The Party wrote then that “if Northern Ireland signs up to the Enterprise Zone scheme, no real jobs will be created, and the costly scheme will only benefit super-rich corporations”. In fact, due to the failure of the market and despite the lure of state subsidies,  only one medium-sized company benefitted from setting up shop in the Atlantic Link site.

Thatcherite Policy

First proposed in Britain in 1978, and a key Thatcherite policy in the 1980s, Enterprise Zones are designated sites which offer tax incentives and simplified planning procedures to help attract businesses to a specific area. In the absence of a genuine industrial policy, around 40  such zones were set up under Thatcher and John Major, offering tax breaks, rates holidays and other incentives to companies locating within them.

In Northern Ireland, two enterprise zones were set up, one in Derry and another in the Duncrue Industrial Estate in North Belfast, an area of the city where, according to recent research, one in three children grow up in poverty . If anyone gained from Thatcher era enterprise zones, it wasn’t the working people of North Belfast.

Resurrected by Cameron and Clegg

Like a horribly predictable sequel, the Enterprise Zone idea was revived under David Cameron’s disastrous austerity government, during which UK life expectancy plateaued,  the gap between rich and poor widened precipitously, and those jobs that were created in the wake of global financial collapse of 2008 were mostly badly paid and insecure.

Research shows that of those jobs that are created in Enterprise Zones, most are displaced from other areas. In other words, at the taxpayers’ expense few  to zero new jobs are created. EZs have been good news for a few  for huge corporations, mostly in the USA,  which have succeeded in making massive profits by siphoning off taxpayers’ money and leaving the scene as soon as they no longer advantaged by government largesse. In general terms, however, Enterprise Zones have proven costly and ineffective and Northern Ireland’s EZ has produced no new jobs and no inward investment.

Few Jobs, Mostly in Retail

Elsewhere in these islands, Enterprise Zones have not been successful, even by Thatcherite profit-driven standards. According to a 2019 Report by the thinktank, Centre for Cities, since 2012 Enterprise Zones in England have seen the creation of 13,650 jobs, not all of which are attributable to investment as a result of EZ incentives. This is a much smaller figure than the 56,000 new jobs touted by Cameron and Clegg in 2012. In addition, breaking down the data shows that those jobs that were created were mostly low-skilled activities in local services such as retail, and not the high-skilled, export-oriented jobs touted by the Tories.

Incidentally, back in 2010 Sinn Féin “quietly” bought into the development of Enterprise Zones in Northern Ireland, which was in line with its commitment to reduced corporate tax rates.  According to business magazine, Agenda NI “quietly, the party supports the UK Government’s enterprise zone commitment, while expressing scepticism that this will come about”.

Blame Game

When the local press highlighted the failure of the Atlantic Link site,  an almost comic round of finger-pointing began. Independent Unionist MLA Claire Sugden said it was a “wasted opportunity so far” and that “everybody involved needs to step up their efforts in order that this asset is not wasted”.

A Department of Economy spokesperson said that the council had the “lead responsibility for marketing the campus as landowners.” Democratic Unionist Party councillor Aaron Callan  went on the defensive,  saying that “we, the council, are not the only partner in this, there is the University [of Ulster], there is Invest NI and others that need to come in behind this project. There needs to be more willingness to put weight into it”.

But the blame game is a distraction, aimed at hiding in plain sight the fact that none of those involved have the slightest idea of an alternative to this failed and disastrous approach to job creation. And so, they talk of ‘wasted opportunities’ ‘the need to step up efforts’,  and lack of ‘willingness’. People seeking alternatives should look elsewhere.

Make AMAZON pay

The capitalist glorification of Black Friday in conditions of rising levels of poverty and inequality suffered a blow this year when Amazon workers and their supporters went on strike and protested against Amazon’s growing power and exploitation. 

On Friday, workers around the world created “Make Amazon Pay Day”. An international coalition of unions, equality and environmental groups staged a day of action. 

This year alone, Amazon has been exposed as:  

• Reporting up to £8.2 billion of its UK sales in Luxembourg to avoid UK taxes 
• Requiring almost 1,000 ambulance callouts to its UK fulfilment centres since 2018, including 178 callouts to its site in Tilbury, Essex, where a male employee died this month
• Sacking tech workers for speaking out in solidarity with warehouse workers’ unsafe conditions  
• Deploying an intrusive and pervasive system of workplace surveillance or its workers 
• Subjecting workers to oppressive working conditions with too few breaks, excessive and unreasonable productivity targets and an unsafe working environment. 

Amazon warehouse workers have taken part in work stoppages and protests across the globe, determined to secure fair wages, fair taxes, and accountability for Amazon’s impact on the planet.

In the UK Amazon warehouses are not unionised and workers have little protection. Amazon is hostile to trade unions. It refuses to give workers basic rights or to recognise a union. While billionaire Jeff Bezos can engage in the obscenity of a “space” flight vanity project costing millions of dollars, Amazon workers can barely make ends meet and are enduring appalling conditions. 

Amazon exemplifies the predatory nature of the capitalist system. Workers must make it pay.

Border Poll divisive and unnecessary

In a joint statement, Councillor Ted Tynan of the Party’s Cork Region and Hugh Scullion from the Northern Ireland Region have set out the divisive and potentially dangerous consequences risked by calls for a border poll.

“Increasingly, almost every issue in this country is viewed myopically through sectarian glasses with orange and green lenses”, they say

“So it is with the growing clamour for a Border Poll on a united Ireland, driven largely by Sinn Fein, and now supported by a number of new organisations, some academics, a variety of media commentators and other nationalist parties, north and south, desperate not to be left behind this wave of manufactured urgency” the statement says.

The Border Poll argument is cynically presented as a ‘done deal’ based on a simple and dangerous concept of territorial realignment. It is, we are being told, only a matter of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

Setting out the Party’s position the pair say, “…[we have] always pursued and remain committed to the objective of a unitary socialist state on this island. We have long recognised that is a long term and onerous project and it can only be built on working class unity rather than the territorial unity of a united capitalist Ireland which offers no solution to the urgent problems facing working people, north and south.

“When the rhetoric is stripped away, when the concrete realities are exposed, then the border poll campaign becomes an undisguised all-class alliance designed to promote the policies of Sinn Fein and benefit the aspirations of some sections of the professional middle-classes, north and south”.

What the border poll campaigners don’t want to consider, and don’t want raised, is the necessary discussion on the fundamental restructuring of Irish society to ensure that working people control their own destinies.

“There is a real risk and potential for sectarian violence in the aftermath of a border poll – irrespective of the outcome. The people on this island, and particularly in Northern Ireland, have witnessed more than enough bloodshed, intimidation and death – but that has been the outcome of belligerent nationalism, British and Irish, for decades”.

These are real and ominous possibilities which border poll campaigners seem content to ignore or disregard.

“The unity of the working class and a fundamental transformation of our social, political and economic system remain an absolute and non-negotiable prelude to the creation of a single unitary state”.

It is incumbent upon all progressive forces in this country, on all socialists, trade unionists, democrats and anti-sectarian forces to challenge and oppose the ill-conceived clamour for a Border Poll, expose it for the shallow, sectarian scam that it is, and to continue to build the basis of working-class unity as the only secure foundation for the people of this island and beyond.

Read the statement in full here:

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Standing squarely with Cuba

The messages from this evening’s solidarity rally at Belfast City Hall were clear for all to hear – ‘End the Blockade’, ‘No more US Interference’ ‘Let Cuba Live’

The show of support at the event organised by the Cuban Solidarity Forum and supported by the Belfast Trades Council was impressive, colourful and loud.

After nearly seven decades of unrelenting aggression against Cuba and the Cuban people the US, under the presidency of Joe Biden, continues and escalates its belligerence

Despite world opinion, the economic, commercial and financial blockade applied by
the government of the United States against Cuba is being maintained and it continues
to have profound repercussions on the Cuban economy.

The blockade is deliberately designed to limit Cuba’s right to follow its own development path. The US has opportunistically and criminally tightened the blockade during the pandemic.

But Cuba does not stand alone. In Belfast and in towns and cities across the world the solidarity is tangible, unbroken and determined.

Tynan turns off private taps

A resolution designed to halt the privatisation of water services has been adopted by Cork City Council. Proposed by Workers Party President CouncillorTed Tynan the motion urged the council to contact the three trade unions currently involved in discussions about transferring council staff to the new Irish Water body.

The motion was passed almost unanimously with only one councillor voting against.

Cllr Tynan said,” If these negotiations are successful, they will have a major negative impact on the ability of local authorities, such as Cork City Council, to continue to provide essential services to its citizens, and, most importantly, will lead to Irish Water becoming a private company, resulting in our water, waste water treatment, and sewage services falling into private ownership”.

The main political parties, North and South, are quite comfortable to turn public utilities into private companies. They have no qualms about a society where the relentless pursuit of profit takes priority and everything is measured by its retail value alone. Nor have they any difficulties acting as the broker in converting public ownership into private profit.

Battle for a Bill of Rights is far from over

The Northern Ireland Assembly’s Ad Hoc Committee on a Bill of Rights is due to publish the result of its consultation process early in 2022.

This may well be just another step in a long, arduous and frequently dishonest journey that has been managing to avoid introducing a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland despite the requirement of the Good Friday Agreement to do so.

In fact, the demand of a Bill of Rights goes back much further than that. The Workers Party has been campaigning to have the legislation introduced for over 50 years.

Restating the case

Given recent events this is a timely opportunity to restate the case for a Bill of Rights and raise many serious concerns that, just like the requirement to introduce Integrated Education, the Executive parties will, as they have done in the past, divert and dilute the debate to produce a statement of ‘nationalist rights’, and ‘unionist rights’ in place of a comprehensive Bill of Rights for all citizens in Northern Ireland.

The warning signs are already evident. Marches and rallies for ‘nationalist rights’ have taken place already, civic unionism sets itself up against civic nationalism – each pitching their own ‘rights based ‘agendas – and, before even a single local view had been submitted to it, the Assembly’s Ad Hoc Committee on a Bill of Rights stated that “Some of the rights and protections that we have examined are issues around language culture and heritage”.

Direction of travel

Important as these issues are when the committee with the responsibility for the consultation process leads with these identity-based issues at the expense of civil, social, economic and human rights concerns, then the preferred direction of travel becomes all too obvious.

Taken together with the proposals announced this week which would effectively debar civil actions and deny inquests into Troubles killings alongside the end of any legal inquiries into Troubles related incidents, the case needs to be remade for a comprehensive citizen-based Bill of Rights.

Rights for All

When the Workers Party made its submission to the current consultation process we said,

“The purpose of a Bill of Rights should be to establish and guarantee the relationship between citizens and the state. It must form the basis for democratic rights as the guarantor of the civil liberties of all citizens and of the political rights of all political parties, groups and individuals.

It must also expressly guarantee that everyone in Northern Ireland is equal before the law and has equal rights”.

That would mean that a Bill of Rights should provide a positive statement of the rights which each citizen can expect, and demand, of the state and also provide the means whereby those rights will be protected and enforced if they are infringed.

Social and economic rights

We also affirmed our belief that the protection of civil and political rights cannot be effectively guaranteed without a full programme of social and economic construction.

We are committed to a political system where the majority of the population, the working class, regardless of communal background, is properly and fairly represented in all aspects of political life. A Bill of Rights must reflect and underpin that ambition

A Bill of Rights must also address the rights of women and, in particular, family planning and reproductive rights, including the right to abortion, and the right of women to full and equal participation in political decision-making and public life. It must address the rights of workers and encompass core international standards of trade union rights.

Citizenship versus Sectarianism  

It is highly unlikely, in fact it is a near certainty, that the outcome of the consultation by the Assembly’s Ad Hoc Committee on a Bill of Rights will not produce a citizen-based rights programme.

Two other outcomes are more likely. Either it will kick the can further down the road and beyond the life time of this current Assembly mandate or it will propose a set of rights for ‘the two communities’, removing the concept of citizenship from the debate and further compounding the sectarian division of this society.

The battle for a Bill of Rights is far from over

The demand for equality and democratic rights is not the property or the preserve of any one political party or tribal grouping. Its ownership should rest firmly with citizens as citizens. Only on that basis will progress be made and citizenship flourish.

Workers Party’s submission to the Assembly’s Ad Hoc Committee on a Bill of Rights
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