Introducing Jeremy Drinkall

I am standing in Vauxhall to give people a chance to vote Anticapitalist in the general election.

I have lived in the Vauxhall area for the past 12 years. I am a teaching assistant at Lilian Baylis Technology School, where I am a shop steward for the Unison trade union.

I have worked in a number of local campaigns. With Lambeth Defend Council Housing I opposed the privatisation of the Ashmole estate in the Oval. I also joined Keep Our NHS Public in trying to stop profiteers taking over primary care facilities in Myatts Fields.

In my campaign, I want to listen to as many residents as possible and help them fight back against poor housing, deteriorating services and growing unemployment.

Background

I am 49 years old and have been a socialist for 30 years. As a student, I took part in a General Strike in Canada — and haven’t looked back since.

On my return to England, I supported the Great Miners’ Strike, collecting food parcels for the strikers’ families and campaigning for solidarity. When the South-East Region TUC called a one-day General Strike, I helped picket out a power station – unfortunately getting spotted on TV by the Head Chef at my workplace and promptly getting sacked!

I later moved to Cardiff and carried on supporting the miners, especially at Tower Colliery, where they successfully set up a workers’ co-operative.

I worked at Companies House for 12 years, where I was elected branch secretary for the civil service trade union (now called PCS). Among the many battles there, we fought off privatisation through a combination of strikes and political campaigning.

In the other great upheaval of the 1980s, the anti-poll tax rebellion, I started up a local Anti-Poll Tax Union. It was a massive movement, where 14 million people refused to pay this unfair tax and eventually defeated the government. Our local union, like many others, was so big we had street and block “captains” to organise leafleting, meetings and blockades to defy the bailiffs.

A Labour Party member, my constituency often found itself in opposition to the leadership’s policies and was undemocratically shut down – as were one in eight CLPs in the late 1980s. I left soon afterwards and joined Workers Power, which is standing under the Anticapitalist banner in this election.

Having fought against police racism with the Cardiff Three and Mark Harris campaigns and experienced police violence on demos and picket lines, I came to the conclusion that the state was not neutral but defended the rich and powerful. We needed to dismantle this repressive machine and replace it with the rule of workers’ democratic councils through a revolutionary struggle.

New party

I moved to South London in 1998, where I edited Workers Power newspaper and website for 10 years under the pen name Jeremy Dewar.

I threw myself into the anticapitalist movement, taking part in the Stop the City demonstration in 1999 and organising workers and youth to participate in several international demos against the giant corporations’ greed and the deepening poverty of the world’s workers and small farmers. One memorable – and frightening – experience was being in Genoa when the police shot dead unarmed protestor Carlo Giuliani.

I was a founder member of Globalise Resistance, serving on its steering committee, where I campaigned for an anticapitalist movement on the same mass scale as existed in Italy and France. I also visited Palestine in this period as part of the International Solidarity Movement, where I helped build non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation.

Another key issue during these years was the struggle against war. I had opposed Britain’s troops in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, so when the Labour government sent troops to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, I was quick to set up a Stop the War group in Camberwell.

When two million of us marched against the impending invasion of Iraq in February 2003, it highlighted the fact that there was a “democratic deficit” in British politics. How come the antiwar majority was not represented in parliament?

I had supported the Socialist Alliance, which stood Greg Tucker and Theresa Bennett locally in the 2000 London and 2001 General Elections. But now I became convinced we needed a new working class party to fight for socialism.

Unfortunately, Respect failed on both counts since it made serious concessions to middle class businessmen and Muslim clerics. Instead I joined the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party and served on its steering committee. The need for a new party remains a key task for socialists and I hope my campaign in Vauxhall can help bring one into existence.

Vauxhall

Since 2008 I have refocused my political energies on Vauxhall. I work as a teaching assistant in Lilian Baylis Technology School, where I have seen first hand the unfair disadvantages young, working class people experience. One day a week, I work at the Vauxhall site of Lambeth College.

I am steadfastly against Academies, which hand over our schools and taxpayers’ money to private individuals and corporations, and starve other schools of resources. Instead, parents, school students and education workers should run our schools, while all schools should be fully funded and serve the whole community. We need to expand colleges and universities and provide a grant to all students over 16, so that all our kids can get the best possible start in life.

I am a shop steward for my union, Unison, and have campaigned to unite council workers with tenants to defend council housing and stop the privatisation of estates, cleaners, concierges and maintenance workers. I am a prominent member of the Right To Work campaign, a founding member of its steering committee.

In the past year or two, I have joined Defend Council Housing to campaign against the transfer of the Ashmole estate in Oval ward, and Keep Our NHS Public to campaign against a private consortium swallowing up GP surgeries in Vassall ward.

Unlike other candidates, I see my campaign as an opportunity to listen to local people about what really matters to them – and then help them take up these issues and fight for real change.

Getting representatives in parliament is important. But real change comes when millions of ordinary people say “Enough is enough” and stand together to fight for another world. I believe another world is possible, a socialist world. I really look forward to taking this message onto the streets, into the communities and out to the workplaces of Vauxhall this spring.


Published and promoted by Vauxhall ANTICAPITALISTS – WORKERS POWER on behalf of Jeremy Drinkall both at Unit 256, 99-103 Lomond Grove, London SE5 7HN