Love Eddie Izzard, Hate New Labour

Supporters of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition protested today as Eddie Izzard came to campaign for the Labour Party. Ironically, the spin doctors thought that the Atrium campus of the university of Glamorgan would be a good place to take him, forgetting that - according to one Uni Glam worker we spoke to - the university is threatened with a 16% budget cut this year thanks to the policies of New Labour and the other main parties. Students returned last September to find the courses they were studying had been axed and they had to leave or scrabble around to find something else to study.

Protesters held up placards adapting some of Izzard's sketches, with slogans like "Labour: covered in sleeeeeeaze," "University: now harder to get into than an orange" and "War in Afghanistan: no cake, just death." We got a warm reception from those who turned up and were asked to vote Labour: Izzard fans can spot a joke when they hear one.

New Labour, however, don't have such a well developed sense of humour and watching them scuttling around trying to hide our placards from Eddie with red balloons was, frankly, embarrassing. They physically barred all of us from entering the Vulcan, including a prominent member of the campaign that saved the pub.

Campaign to Reopen Llanedern Post Office

Llanedeyrn residents were shocked this week when they turned up at the Post Office and found out it had been closed without warning. So was I! - we were at the Maelfa on Tuesday campaigning to abolish the carpark charges at the Heath Hospital and the Post Office was very busy.

I contacted Post Office Limited today, who told me that there is no re-opening date, that the Llanedeyrn Office has been closed indefinitely and that there is no emergency plan to provide services locally until the Office can be reopened permanently. Many people, including pensioners, are now having to trek all the way to Albany Road to use the Post Office there and fear (justifiably, in my opinion) that the Post Office won't reopen unless there's a campaign to save the service.

Post Office Limited wouldn't comment but there are rumours that the local franchise operators couldn't keep up with their payments and have gone bankrupt.

If this is true, then the finger of blame should be pointed straight at the Labour Government, which - besides carrying out a massive programme of Post Office closures around the country - has cut subsidies to local Post Offices, putting the important public service they provide at risk.

All three main parties, including the Liberal Democrats, plan to push privatisation further in Royal Mail, putting services further at risk. It seems the main parties won't be happy until communities like Llanedeyrn are stripped of every last shop and service. The Liberal Democrat and Plaid Cymru Council Executive plan to close the local high school Llanedeyrn and now it seems the Post Office is at risk.

The Socialist Party and supporters of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition are campaigning for the immediate reopening of Llanedeyrn Post Office and for fair funding and democratic control for all public services. No more treating vital public services like businesses - put services before profits.

Save NHS Facilities at the Royal Infirmary

Plans to break up health facilities at Cardiff Royal Infirmary are rolling ahead but so is the campaign to save them.

Socialist Party members have been at the heart of the campaign since the beginning, and helped to set up CRI - Save Its Services (CRI-S.I.S.) over a decade ago. First, campaigners - with a petition of over 100,000 names - prevented the selling off of the site, then we saved the buiding from demolition, next won £5million for extra services, and now a consultant employed by the Welsh Assembly has confirmed what we knew all along - that the CRI should be restored as a fully-functioning hospital. The pressure from the campaign has forced politicians to restore some NHS services to the CRI, including a badly needed walk-in clinic, but no casualty or triage facility, which the city centre badly needs. Emergency patients at the Heath hospital already face the longest waiting times in the country, thanks to the cutbacks in funding under New labour.

Since when is a "demolition" an "investment"?

The main parties are queuing up to take the credit for this victory (won by campaigning AGAINST them!) and they all support the "investment" approved by Labour's Assembly Health Minister. But we're not laying down our placards yet: take another look at the plans and you'll notice that 10% of the funding announced will be used up in knocking down all but the core of the original infirmary building, with no clear plans to replace. Freedom of Information requests to see a copy of Hunter's report have been denied. If the politicians of the main parties had listened to a previous report, we could have had a fully-refurbished CRI for £16-17 million, a fraction of the cost of this seemingly cut-price version on offer today.

A third of the buildings have gone already, and, if completed, 80% of the bed space which the CRI could house if renovated will disappear under the plans. One Health Board official dismissed this as getting rid of "100 years of tat" but the programme's motivated more by the need to make cuts and sell land off to developers if possible than it is with preserving the building. The Health Trust had its budget slashed by £20million last year, and the Assembly had the Grade II listing status removed from the bulidings so that the wreckers could take them down. If residents in the East of Cardiff aren't careful, they'll end up with another St David's - a small hospital in a massive carpark surrounded by private housing developments.

And we might not see an increase in NHS facilities in Cardiff under the plans. Services in Roath, Splott, Radyr and Butetown could be cut and moved to the CRI.

Liberal Democrats like our sitting MP have refused to say they won't support savage cutbacks in NHS services after the election. But Labour and the Tories - despite their claims to protect NHS spending - will do this same. After all - THIS IS EXACTLY THE PLEDGE THAT MARGARET THATCHER MADE before being elected, and all the main parties .

It's true: we do need to make cuts in the NHS. We need to cut the private profit-makers - like those running the carpark at the Heath and those hoping to make money out of CRI land - out of our public services. No more making money out of people being ill. The only way to cut bureacracy without cutting services is to run the NHS democratically, controlled and managed by health workers who know the job best and the working-class communities who rely on the services. No cuts in Hospitals to pay for MPs' Expenses and Bankers' Bonuses.

Sir Peter Gershon, the Butcher of the Public Sector, has been taken on by the Tories and is calling for £12billion more cuts and another 40,000 job losses in the public sector. Cameron's also calling for a pay cut for public sector workers and higher tuition fees and also for a longer working life.

In other words, the tories will try and make working class people pay for the recession with unemployment, lower wages, cuts to public services, a higher retirement age and by reversing the access to higher education they gained in the past.

Even this, however, doesn't mount up to their full programme of cutbacks. Labour has said that there is a £22bn whole in the Tories' plan and the Tories haven't denied it! They've countered by saying there's a massive hole in Labour's plans too. Both are right, because both Labour and Tories (and Lib Dems, who have refused to rule out cutbacks in the NHS after the election).

But - as a start - why not spend the £4.5bn a year spent on Afghanisan and Iraq by Britain and the £76bn pledged to renew Trident on public services instead? Why not stop private companies from squeezing profits out of cash-strapped public services? These are the real "efficiency savings" that need to be made, but it's only Socialists who are willing to make them.

Support Union Members' Democratic Right to Take Action to Defend Jobs

Socialist Party members who support TUSC were campaigning today in Clifton Street and Albany Road to scrap the anti trade union laws after another disgraceful decision banning workers from exercising their right to take industrial action. With no political party representing us, trade unions are the only thing standing between those who depend on public services and the main parties who plan to go further even than Thatcher did in slashing them to ribbons.

Hot on the heels of the second BA strike, postponed from its original date on the whim of a millionaire judge, RMT signallers and maintenance workers were due to take action next week to fight against their employers' plan to cut jobs. Network Rail wants to axe 1500 maintenance workers and are ripping up agreements with signal workers as a step towards cutting their jobs and worsening their working conditions. The result could easily be another Paddington, Hatfield or Potters' Bar.

But the courts have stepped in again. Unions are bound by so many requirements that defending services and jobs by taking industrial action legally is becoming impossible.



This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the first of Thatcher's anti-trade union laws and the fact that almost half that period has been spent under a Labour government demonstrates the character of that party today and the urgent need for a "Taff Vale Two" - a move by the trade unions to help found a party that represents ordinary working class people and trade unionists.

Meanwhile, Liberal Democrat Assembly Members demonstrated the contempt their party has for trade unions by making a point of crossing PCS picketlines at the National Assembly. Centreforum, A Liberal Democrat think-tank, has effectively called for the expulsion of trade unions from national negotiations over pay, earning the condemnation of Unison, my trade union. And Plaid Cymru members in Caerphilly have embarrassed leaders of their party by withdrawing facilities for trade union reps in the Council in order to try and weaken their campaign against cutbacks.

It's often said that the trade union movement, without a political voice, is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. But, unless it bursts out of the legal constraints binding it today, it will face its toughest fight in living memory with both hands bound.

The Contempt for Democracy

The attitude of all the main parties towards democracy became crystal clear yesterday.

In a letter to Cardiff Council, Leighton Andrews, Assembly Education Minister, agreed with the decision of Cardiff Council to close Llanrumney and Rumney High School and Eastern Leisure, and replace these three important community facilities with one school with some scanty leisure facilities attached on the site of Rumney Rec. The community in all likelihood will lose the playing fields there too unless the plans are stopped.

A referendum of local residents voted a whopping 93% against the plan on a turnout higher than the council elections but Andrews, a Labour Minister, nevertheless supported Cardiff's Liberal/Plaid Cymru executive's decision.

I and other Socialist Party members helped to set up the campaign against the plan but had to battle against Labour Party supporters who argued that ordinary people should relax, not cause too much trouble and rely on "their representatives" in the assembly and council to defend the facilities - this despite the fact that Labour councillors sit on the committee that drafted the closures plan, and that Labour (and Plaid) Assembly ministers have created the problems in schools though underfunding.

The way schools are funded sets up schools to fail. Because funding is allocated on a per-pupil basis, if fewer children go a school one year - for whatever reason - the school gets less money. It becomes harder and harder, therefore, to keep schools running and if there wasn't a problem in the school before, after years of not getting enough cash to maintain school buildings etc then one soon develops. It's a deliberate and cynical attempt to cut back education purely to save money which will leave some communities, like Llanedeyrn, without a community school.

Instead, getting slightly less children one year should mean that class sizes become smaller and chlidren get more time with teachers. In that way the quality of education would both increase overall and become more even across the city.

The game isn't over yet. Campaigners from Llanrumney, Llanedyern and Canton, where Lansdowne Primary School is also under threat, should link up with campaigners across Cardiff and stand against the main parties in the council elections this year, demanding an end to the school closures plan. Former First Minister, Labour's Rhodri Morgan estimated that 170 schools would close across Wales, with a devastating impact on the communities which they serve. In Cardiff alone, 600 jobs in 22 schools are threatened by the plans. We've got to get organised to defeat them. We need funding for schools based on need, not on some marketised perversion of education.

Will they get away with it?

We're at risk of being overwhelmed by tidal wave after tidal wave of MPs' corruption scandals.

Full details were finally released yesterday of how Tory Lord Ashcroft was able to buy his way into the House of Lords, even though he doesn't pay taxes in the UK. I think we should call him "The Enemy Not-exactly-within".

After Cash for Honours, Cash for Questions, secret donations from millionaires and countless other examples of corruption, perhaps the footage released by the Sunday Times last weekend of MPs selling their services to private companies should shock us less, but this is the most explicit example I've ever seen of what we've know all along - that the politicians of the main parties are in it for themselves and for what they can do for big business. Stephen Byers described himself as a "Cab for hire" and boasted he'd already helped out Tescos and National Express.

It's wrong to imagine, however, that the corruption is limited to three former ministers from one party. Actually, it's general. The expenses scandal, which implicated all the main parties, showed us that. (I noticed, by the way, that Jenny Willott, Liberal Democrat MP for Cardiff Central, handed us a bill for £23,083 - on top of her £64,766 basic salary - including £499 for a tv and a £933.50 contribution towards her £1,709.60 four-poster bed.)

In reality, all the main parties are touting for (big) business.

I heard during the PCS strike rally on the 8th March that no fewer than 27 Labour ministers who forced through privatisation when in office have been rewarded with grossly overpaid jobs with the companies to which they handed over our public services.

Personally, I don't think people are angry enough; or, rather, the angry people aren't focussed and organised enough so that they can change things. But Ms Willott is concerned about something else - that the tidal wave of public anger at MPs will put some people off the job. But ordinary working class people don't need representative that bury their noses in the trough, and if these people are put off by the spotlight that's been shone onto their corruption, then that's a good thing and good riddance to them.

We need MPs like Dave Nellist, a Socialist MP who took an ordinary worker's wage when he was in Parliament, donating the rest of his pay to local, trade union and labour movement campaigns. He was already publishing his expenses in the eighties, and managed to cope without demanding the working class pays for luxury goods for "their" MP that they could never hope to own themselves. Like me, Dave's been selected as a candidate for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition for the upcoming general election. Now, are we going to let them get away with their corruption or are we going to vote for workers' MPs on a worker's wage?