A workers’ MP on a workers’ wage
The MPs expenses scandal exposed the rotten heart of the British political system. The Tory grandees get their moats cleaned with our money, the Labour MPs commit fraud on their mortgage payments, and one front bench Lib Dem claimed thousands of pounds for furniture!
Anticapitalists say “out with them all”.
For democracy – against privilege
Democracy is only wafer thin in Britain. We get a chance to elect a government just every four years – with the winning party rarely if ever getting more than 40 per cent of the vote. No wonder more and more people are choosing not to vote in elections.
We still have the unelected Queen at the head of the political system. We are one of the only “democracies” in the west that has a completely unelected upper chamber in Parliament: the House of Lords. Reforming it is another one of Labour’s broken and forgotten promises.
Every democratic right we have was won by working class struggle – from the right to vote and the right to assemble and strike to the right to protest. Today, our rights are under attack.
Anticapitalists defend every one of our democratic rights, while pointing out how limited democracy is within this capitalist system.
We fight for these rights, so we can take forward the fight to overthrow this corrupt and profiteering system.
Against repression and torture – reclaim our democratic rights
At home the “War on Terror” has brought a wave of attacks on our democratic rights too. Not a year goes by without giving police even more powers to detain us, hold us, arrest us, and take away more and more of our rights.
The aim is always to give suspects less right to a fair hearing, to increase police powers to detain, to stop and search people in the street, and close down demonstrations and protests they don’t like. In Bolton last month, the police brutally attacked an anti-racist demo and arrested 55 protesters, including Unite Against Fascism joint secretary Weyman Bennett on charges of “conspiracy”, while ignoring the violence of the racist and fascist English Defence League.
Each of these acts has nothing to do with “fighting terrorism” – they are all about taking away democratic rights and boosting state repression. Overwhelmingly the victims have been Muslim people – the overwhelming majority of whom loathe terrorism, but are treated as the “enemy within” just like communists were in the Cold War.
It’s racist, it’s repressive and it has to stop – we need to unite and fight for our democratic rights.
The newspapers always try to get us to support these repressive laws. “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” they say. But this assumes that the government and the state can be trusted and are on our side. What if they’re not?
The Tories severely restricted the effective right to strike in response to management actions – look how the courts stopped BA cabin crew and Network Rail signallers striking recently. Yet the bosses can sack workers at a minute’s notice and escort them off premises they have worked at for years.
Labour, under Blair and Brown, refused to restore the basic right to strike. We need to fight for workers’ right to decide to strike at mass meetings and abolish the complicated balloting procedure controlled by unelected judges.
The Battle for Democracy
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