Socialist Resistance Forum: The General Election & the Left

Socialist Resistance Forum: The General Election & the Left

Speaker: Alan Thornett – Respect National Council and Socialist Resistance

Tuesday 17th November, 7.30pm, Bennetts Bar, Bennetts Hill, Birmingham City Centre

Despite the collapse of the thirty year neo-liberal project, the three main parties are promising more of the same. No matter how much the right wing crusade has fallen into discredit, they have on offer; war, destruction, unemployment, public service cuts, wage cuts, privatisation, racism, repression and surveillance and a lack of affordable housing for working people. The differences between these parties are of degree, not of substance. Labour are putting in (inadequate) fiscal stimuli, whereas the Tories would let the market rip. But all three are united on the cuts and making the working class pay for the crisis . . . .

Don’t worry, here comes the New Labour Titanic to save us from Global Warming! If they are allowed to get away with it, the damage and chaos they create will cause even greater misery and provide more opportunities for the far right. But this is by no means inevitable. The capitalist onslaught can, and must be, stopped by mass opposition. Strikes, rallies, demonstrations and occupations need to become the order of the day. It is not a question of going back to the seventies, it is a question of going forward towards a new society; one based on public need and not on private profit. We will not get there because of the actions of great leaders, we will get there by the kind of mobilisations that almost brought Blair down in 2003, that broke the Poll Tax in 1990, that won the recent college dispute in London and that challenged the right of factory owners to do as they please at Visteon and Vestas.

Organisation

When in struggle, working people normally have numbers and militancy on their side, but what is often lacking is organisation, solidarity and leadership. This forum will concentrate on one aspect of all this, the need for a new political party of the oppressed.

The General Election

It is important that there is a viable left challenge at the General Election. While there are a small number of left Labour candidates worth backing, a vote for them is also a vote for the Brown (or whoever replaces him) leadership. If you have a right wing Labour candidate, you get the worst of both worlds. And while no one wants to see the Tories win, it is totally insufficient to have a strategy of just voting

Labour

It is now very late for the whole of the left to construct a united team of candidates, but even now any moves towards unity will be welcome. One such opportunity will be at the conference to be hosted by the RMT in London on November 7th. The backing of one of the country’s strongest unions would be a real spur towards unity against New Labour. On November 14th, there will be the Respect conference in Birmingham. It has the biggest electoral footprint on the left, and has the possibility of doing very well, or even winning, in three Westminster seats.

(Socialist Resistance will be backing these challenges). Then there is Dave Nellist in Coventry, Caroline Lucas in Brighton, and a few other areas where the left could do well.

The forum will discuss the outcome of the two conferences mentioned above and other developments towards left unity before the election, and how we can most aid the success of the candidates already in the field.

Latin America has swung left over recent years. Can we do likewise over here?

Socialist Resistance at 0777 594 2841
or write to PO Box 1109 London N4 2UU
or visit www.socialistresistance.net/
or visit http://birminghamresist.wordpress.com/ for Birmingham Socialist Resistance
For International Viewpoint , visit www.internationalviewpoint.org/

Birmingham Socialist Resistance open letter to the Birmingham Socialist Left

• No to a massive assault on jobs, wages, pensions and welfare!
• For a joint socialist left General Election Campaign in Birmingham!
• Support the Respect Candidate in the Sparkbrook by – election!

A government commission in the Irish republic has recommended cutting 17,500 public sector jobs (equivalent to a cut of 300,000 in Britain), cuts in wages, pensions and a 20% cut in child benefit. These measures are supported by all the mainstream parties including the Greens.

David Davis, former shadow Home Secretary writing in the Sunday Times 26.7.09  proposed axing “middle class welfare” including child benefit and the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance – starving the kids and freezing the pensioners!!

These policies will be implemented with a vengeance by a future Tory or Tory/Liberal coalition government or even by a New Labour government in the extreme unlikelihood of it being elected.

The capitalist politicians have really no alternative since they accept the existing distribution of wealth and income which is inherent in the British capitalist system. They will not propose a real distribution of wealth and power but will allow the bankers and big capitalists to get fat bonus and enormous dividend payments as usual.

There have been various moves towards left unity in the past; from the Socialist Alliance to Respect, the call from the Socialist Party and more recently from the Socialist Workers Party and the unity shown during the recent No2EU campaign. This had the vital backing of the most militant trade union, the RMT, as well as other left forces. Yet it must be recognised that Respect still has the largest electoral footprint, with one MP and 10 councillors nationally, and is a serious electoral force in this city.

We think it is urgent the socialist left come together to mount a serious challenge to the consensus for the need for drastic public expenditure cuts at the next general election. Even a campaign standing in 20 -50 constituencies, stating opposition to these cuts and promoting workers’ action such as the Vestas occupation, will encourage resistance to these austerity measures when they are introduced by a future Tory government.

The main themes of the socialist election campaign should be as follows;

1. Opposition to the planned austerity measures; cutting jobs, wages, pensions and social benefits. Support     for workers action, legal and illegal strikes and occupations.

2. Defence of the environment; urgent and radical action to combat global warming.

3. Troops out of Afghanistan and Justice for the Palestinian people.

4. Opposition to racism, fascism and Islamophobia.

5.   For a proportional system for the election of MPs.

We also are making two specific proposals;

1.     Mobilise now to support the Respect candidate, Shokat Ali, in the by- election in  Sparkbrook due in September. Match words with action! Ring  0781 217 2885 to help.

2.     A meeting should be called between all organisations and individuals who support a    joint socialist electoral challenge in Birmingham at the General Election. If progress is   made with this, a launch rally featuring national speakers from the organisations and individuals involved could be held.

Socialist Resistance Forum – A Workers Alternative to the Crisis

Speaker – Jerry Hicks – UNITE and RESPECT member

Tuesday 21st April 7.30pm at Bennetts Bar, Bennetts Hill, Birmingham City Centre.

The election campaign for the General Secretary of UNITE was able to reach out and touch and win the hearts and minds of tens thousands of union members who returned a magnificent vote. It was absolutely a left campaign calling for people before profit, public ownership not privatisation, and a green campaign. As a grassroots rank and file member with no access to the union’s resources, and pressing the case single-handed for an election to take place, coming second with nearly 40,000 votes, well ahead of the other two candidates, both full time officials, was a magnificent achievement. Jerry’s message was clearly and proudly taken into workplaces and homes, across every industry and in every part of the country and inspired, motivated and gave hope to the many thousands who heard it and responded to it. The result is a clear vindication of the relevance of the election and appeal of left policies.

New Labour

Amongst the many questions during the election, one that kept being screamed out was “Why does UNITE keep throwing tens of £millions at the Labour Party?”.

Lindsey

During the election the rumbling volcano of anger in the construction industry erupted, with the unofficial strikes at the Lindsey oil refinery; a very clear example of the frustration within the membership. As the construction workers ratcheted up their demands for action, the inadequacy of the union leaders became even more obvious. The Lindsey strike was unofficial – because after three terms of a Labour government the Tory anti-union laws are still in place: but within five days, the members achieved more than they had in five months of delaying tactics from national leaders.

Cowley

And at Cowley’s BMW plant, the management sacked four shifts, 850 temporary staff – at an hour’s notice, with no redundancy pay. When the management left the building after making the announcement, furious members pelted the union reps with tomatoes, seeing the union as part of the problem instead of the solution. How could it get to this? How is it that after three terms of a Labour government, workers, some who had worked for BMW for 4 years, can still be treated like that? Everyone who was a part of this campaign got something positive from it. We were all so close to making history. It has given us a glimpse of what is possible. Apart from the disappointment of not actually winning the election, a great disappointment has been the failure of sections of the left to recognise and grasp this opportunity for what undoubtedly would have been an historic breakthrough.

Fighting Unions Needed

Now, more than ever before, we don’t just need a “campaigning union” we need a fighting union, one that instils a confidence in members to resist employers’ attacks. The bureaucracy will hang on in there until we build a movement strong enough to move them. But if you fight hard enough, with enough confidence, all things are possible.

A Workers’ Alternative

Jerry’s campaign has highlighted the need for a trade union movement that breaks from the priorities of big business, so beloved by New Labour and the other main parties. Policies championed by RESPECT, and now the “People’s Charter” offer a different way forwards. Socialist Resistance would put it more succinctly; we need a complete break from capitalism itself and start pioneering a similar road as that chosen by several Latin American countries; a move towards socialism.

The video of the meeting:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Marxist Perspective

Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Marxist Perspective

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
By George Orwell
Centenary Edition, Penguin Books, 2003
120 pages, £7.99

Nineteen Eighty-Four
By George Orwell
Penguin Classics, 2000
326 pages, £6.99

Review by Alex Miller

This essay is the result of a re-reading of George Orwell’s two most famous novels. Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have acquired the status of textbooks, and are routinely used in schools to demonstrate to children the inherent dangers of social revolution. It is time for a reappraisal.

The “Centenary Edition” of George Orwell’s Animal Farm contains a preface written by Orwell for the first edition (Secker and Warburg 1945) but never published, together with a preface that he wrote specially for a translation for displaced Ukrainians living under British and US administration after World War II.

If we are to take Orwell at his word in the first of these prefaces, Animal Farm is intended as a critique of the Stalinist Soviet regime “from the left”. He explicitly dissociates himself from conservative critiques, which he describes as “manifestly dishonest, out of date, and actuated by sordid motives”.

This is laudable: a left-wing critique of Stalinism was desperately needed in Britain at a time when the prestige of Stalin’s regime was at its apogee, and almost all of the left was turning a blind eye to the regime’s crimes.

No doubt the attempt manifests a degree of intellectual courage on Orwell’s part. But his work has largely been hijacked by the very conservatives he distanced himself from. The Centenary Edition of Animal Farm, for example, displays ringing endorsements from The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express, the Evening Standard, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator.

It is unfair to blame an author for the (mis) use of his work after his death, so let’s ask: how successful was Orwell’s attempt to provide a critique of Stalinism “from the left”? Orwell believed that the Bolshevik revolution had degenerated into something at least as bad as Tsarism, and much abuse has been heaped on Orwell by those on the left who refused to believe that the revolution had indeed degenerated under Stalin. However, we can surely now leave that sort of criticism of Orwell safely behind. It is still common to hear contemporary apologists for Stalinism accuse Orwell of being in the pay of the British intelligence services. In this review we will eschew such an ad homenim approach and instead attempt to appraise Animal Farm (and Nineteen Eight-Four) purely on their merits.

A prerequisite of a left-wing critique of the degeneration of the revolution is the provision of an accurate account of its causes. We can make some progress on this question by considering some of the features that Marx took to be essential for the success of a socialist revolution. Two years prior to the composition of the Communist Manifesto Marx wrote: “A development of the productive forces is the absolutely necessary practical premise [of Communism], because without it want is generalized, and with want the struggle for necessities begins again, and that means that all the old crap must revive” (quoted in Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Dover Books 2004), p.43). In other words, Marx thought that a successful socialist revolution would require the high level of development of material resources made possible by advanced capitalism as well as the most important productive force of all: the highly developed skills and productively applicable knowledge of the proletariat.

This allows us to identify two prominent causes of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution: one the one hand the scarcity of material resources and the low level of industrial and technological development in Russia, and on the other the severe weakening — indeed, near annihilation — of the already numerically small working class, mainly as a result of the civil war that followed the invasion of Bolshevik Russia in 1918-21 by a coalition of several imperialist countries, including Britain and the US.

Thus, although it survived the catastrophic destruction of the civil war, Bolshevik Russia lacked two of the key characteristics identified by Karl Marx as necessary for a successful transition from capitalism to socialism: a very high level of capitalist development (making possible an abundance of material resources), plus a numerically strong working class with a high level of cultural, political and technical development. Without these, the field was open for the formation of bureaucratic strata whose dominance of the USSR was crystallised in Stalin’s dictatorship and the defeat of the Left Opposition within the Bolshevik Party.

Animal Farm completely fails to reflect these key causes of the revolution’s degeneration. In the story, the rebellion of the animals leaves them with a material abundance of food: there is milk galore and a generous harvest of windfall apples, both of which are simply purloined by the cunning and selfish pigs, led by Napoleon (Joseph Stalin) and the soon-to-be-ousted Snowball (Leon Trotsky). In addition, only one animal — a sheep — dies as a result of the “civil war”, an attempt by the deposed farmer Mr Jones and his human friends to retake the farm.

Thus, in Orwell’s story the Rebellion degenerates despite conditions of material abundance and an “animal class” left largely intact by human aggression. Orwell seems to be saying that unless ruled by humans, the mass of animals will inevitably succumb to the tyrannical rule of the cunning and selfish among themselves. Transposed to the human domain, the moral of Orwell’s story is clear: without the capitalist class to govern them, the mass of workers will inevitably find themselves subject to the tyranny of the “brainworkers” among them.

Of course, the animals in the tale are far from the high level of political, cultural and technical development required for the success of a socialist revolution. But there’s the rub: Orwell’s animals, with the exception of the pigs, are, though hard working, loyal and trustworthy, devoid of all intelligence and completely unable to learn anything from experience. This extremely low estimate of the potentialities of the working class is part of Orwell’s conception of the possibilities open to socialists. The options are exhausted by Stalinist totalitarianism and the “social democratic” struggle for reforms within the confines of “western parliamentary democracy”.

The flipside of Orwell’s elitist and patronising attitude towards working people is his highly distorted picture of the nature of British capitalism. In the first preface to Animal Farm, he writes of “the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation” and states that “tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England [sic]”. That would be the “intellectual liberty” afforded — not so long before Orwell’s time — to the Tolpuddle Martyrs and other ordinary workers, imprisoned, banished or simply murdered by the British state for daring to organise trade unions, or the “tolerance and decency” that callously sent millions of young people to the slaughterhouse of World War I — not to mention the horrors of imperial rule within the British Isles and overseas.

The intellectual liberty, tolerance and decency of British imperialism are the real Orwellian fantasy: insofar as those qualities have roots in Britain, they are the product of generations of struggle by the working people that Orwell snobbishly portrays as bovine dunces. It’s not hard to see why Orwell is the darling of the ruling-class newspapers mentioned above. He may genuinely have attempted to provide a critique of Stalin’s USSR “from the left”, but all that he actually produced — in Animal Farm at least — was a banal piece of ruling-class propaganda.

Animal Farm thus fails utterly as a critique of Stalinism “from the left”. We will now attempt a similar evaluation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It has always been regarded as an attack on Russian “Communism” and by extension an attack on any form of communist revolution. Isaac Deutscher, for instance, recounts that when he bought a copy of the book in New York shortly after its publication in 1949 the bookseller said to him: “Have you read this book? You must read it, sir. Then you will know why we must drop the atom bomb on the Bolshies” (Heretics and Renegades (Jonathan Cape 1969), p.50). Does it fare better than Animal Farm as a critique of Stalinism “from the left”?

The action of Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in London (capital of “Airstrip One”) some 40 years after a “socialist revolution”: the ideology of the society is known as “Ingsoc” (“English socialism”), the banners of the ruling party (“The Party”) are scarlet, Party members address each other as “comrade”, and Party literature describes a horrible time before the Revolution when the country was ruled by top-hatted toffs known as “capitalists”. The leader of The Party, whose portrait is omni-present, and who has godlike status, is “Big Brother”, whose physical appearance is remarkably similar to that of Joseph Stalin. The most hated figure is Emmanuel Goldstein, leader of the secret terrorist and anti-Party organization known as “The Brotherhood”. Goldstein’s physical appearance is remarkably similar to that of Leon Trotsky (whose real name, “Bronstein”, surely determined Orwell’s choice of name for Big Brother’s would-be nemesis).

The details of the story of Winston and Julia, the two main characters, needn’t concern us here (though it should be said that it is quite gripping). For our purposes, the main facts are that the Revolution – which apparently started out with high ideals, has degenerated into something similar to, but much worse than, Stalinism. The social composition of the country is revealing. 2% belong to the “Inner Party”, a privileged layer of top-level bureaucrats, and13% belong to the “Outer Party”, a much less privileged layer of minor bureaucrats and administrators: whereas the members of the Inner Party have access to wine, real coffee, and live in plush serviced apartments, the members of the Outer Party live in shoddy accommodation, drink only synthetic “Victory Gin”, and are plagued by shortages of minor goods such as razor blades and shoelaces. Below the Party members come the “proles”, who make up the remaining 85% of the population.

The Ingsoc society is unimaginably totalitarian. Every aspect of the lives of the members of the Outer Party are subject to surveillance by ubiquitous “telecreens”: two-way television sets that are so sophisticated that they can detect changes of heartbeat rhythms in the dark. Any sign of deviation from the principles of Ingsoc is likely to result in the “vaporization” of the person concerned by the “Thought Police”, whose job it is to root out and punish even the remotest hint of unorthodoxy. There is a daily ceremony called the “two minutes hate”, in which Party members whip themselves up into a frenzy of hate against Goldstein, and history is continually falsified: Winston’s job, in the Ministry of Truth, is the systematic rewriting of newspaper articles from the archives in order to delete references to the victims of the Thought Police.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, then, we have another example of a revolution that has degenerated, this time in spite of taking place in an advanced capitalist country with a numerically preponderant proletariat. Now, given that technology has developed to the extent that a large section of the society is under 24 hour surveillance, one would expect the “proles” to manifest a high degree of intelligence and technical skill: after all, who designs, builds and maintains the telescreens that make possible the intricate surveillance operation? (The Inner and Outer Party members don’t, as they have mainly bureaucratic and administrative functions: although some of the Outer Party, such as Julia, have minor technical roles, this doesn’t affect the point we’re making). In Orwell’s story, however, the “proles”, like the beasts in Animal Farm, are completely stupid, and devoid of even the most rudimentary intelligence. They have “debased” cockney accents, are described at one point as “helpless, like the animals”, at another as constituting “an impenetrable wall of flesh”, and at another a working-class mother is described as having ‘powerful mare-like buttocks”.

Thus, Orwell’s elitist and patronizing attitude towards the working class in Animal Farm reappears in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the headline message is the same: a socialist revolution, even if it were to happen in an advanced capitalist country, would be bound to degenerate because of the innate helplessness and lack of intelligence of the working class.

It is worth noting in passing that Marx himself, despite being an infinitely better writer and thinker than Orwell, had an entirely different attitude towards ordinary people. He wrote, for example:

When the communist artisans meet, they seem to be meeting for the purpose of propaganda, etc. But in the process they acquire a new need, the need for society, and what seemed to be a means has become an end in itself. One can see the most illuminating effects of this practical process if one watches a meeting of socialist French workers. Smoking, drinking and eating are no longer merely an excuse for meeting. The society, the entertainment, which is supposed to be for the purpose of meeting, is sufficient in itself: the brotherhood of Man is no idle phrase but the real truth, and the nobility of Man shines out at us from these faces brutalized by toil (quoted in Werner Blumenberg, Karl Marx: An Illustrated History, Verso 2000, p.47).

And there are deeper differences between Orwell and Marx. Orwell believes that power, independently of the specific social circumstances in which it is realized, is governed by a logic that inevitably leads to corruption and exploitation. In his view, even if the working-class successfully seizes power in an advanced capitalist country, corruption and exploitation will inevitably prevail. This idealist and anarchist philosophy is vastly inferior to Marx’s approach, according to which power can only be studied meaningfully as embodied in concrete social and economic structures. This point is well-made by Deutscher: “at heart Orwell was a simple-minded anarchist … To analyse a complicated social background, to try and unravel tangles of political motives, calculations, fears and suspicions, and to discern the compulsion of circumstances behind their action was beyond him. Generalisations about social forces, social trends, and historic inevitabilities made him bristle with suspicion … Yet his distrust of historical generalizations led him in the end to adopt and to cling to the oldest, the most banal, the most abstract, the most metaphysical, and the most barren of all generalizations: all their conspiracies and plots and purges had one source and one source only – ‘sadistic power hunger’. Thus he made his jump from workaday, rationalistic common sense to the mysticism of cruelty which inspires 1984” (Heretics and Renegades, pp.47-8).

Our conclusion is thus that given an understanding of the social and economic factors that led to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, neither Animal Farm nor Nineteen Eighty-Four give us compelling reason to believe that a socialist revolution in an advanced capitalist society must inevitably deteriorate into Stalinism, or worse. Thus, despite whatever other literary merits they may possess, neither of Orwell’s most famous books constitutes an effective critique of Stalinism “from the left”.

Alex gave a talk on Orwell to the Birmingham Socialist Resistance Forum on 1st July. His talk was based on this essay.

Privatisation and Schools in Birmingham

Privatisation and schools in Birmingham

Richard Hatcher

Talk given at Birmingham Trades Council Public Sector meeting “Are we becoming Birmingham PLC?” 24 June 2008 alliance-against-birmingham-academies-logo

I’m going to talk about two issues – Building Schools for the Future and Academies – but we need to remember that they are part of a much wider outsourcing of lots of aspects of national education policy implementation and local authority and school functions, ranging from the National Literacy Strategy to school inspections to schools’ back office functions. The education market is a profitable sector of the British economy and a springboard for getting business overseas.

The CBI in its report The Business of Education Improvement (CBI 2005) identified two key new areas of profitable activity: the 2004 Children Act and Building Schools for the Future. Here I’m focusing on BSF but we need to remember that the Children Act also means big opportunities for the private sector as the local authority’s role is intended to be commissioning services rather than providing them.

Building Schools for the Future

All Birmingham secondary schools are to be rebuilt or refurbished in 6 phases. Phase 1 comprises 11 schools. 50% of the money is for new build, 35% for major refurbishment, and15% for minor works. Of course extra funding for school buildings is very welcome, but there are serious implications for the extension of private influence over the school system in Birmingham and the erosion of democratic control.

There are two issues. One is that 4 of the 11 schools will be funded through PFI (the other 7 through a Revenue Support Grant). The arguments against PFI are well known – it’s more expensive and commits the LA to long term repayments while the building is owned by the PFI consortium – and I won’t dwell on them here.

The second issue, and the most important, is that BSF is a vehicle for outsourcing of Council services. The Labour government’s policy is that Local Authorities should commission services from external providers, not provide them themselves. But the City Council has a choice. It has the legal powers to decide precisely how it wants the BSF programme to be used – it can restrict BSF to building new and improving existing secondary schools in the city, or it can use it as an opportunity to outsource services.

Opening the door to privatising services?

The BSF contract will be awarded later this year and we don’t know what the content of the bids is, but we can get an idea of the Council’s thinking from what it says on its BSF website:

‘The BSF programme is more than just new buildings, it includes changes to the way the curriculum is taught. Birmingham City Council has been looking for a group of businesses to work together to not only build/refurbish all the city’s secondary schools but to help transform teaching and learning.’

The Council’s invitation to tender was advertised in February 2007. In addition to the building work it invited bids to include the following (I quote):

vi) hard facilities management services;
(vii) soft facilities management services;
(viii) information communication and technology (“ICT”) services;
(ix) educational support services;
(x) education programme development services; and (xi) educational strategy services;

‘together with, as appropriate, other community facilities which may be integrated or co-located with such educational facilities and sites and which may include, for example, facilities for health, social care, leisure and facilities to support educational and lifelong learning outcomes’

So the threat to those services which are still provided in-house by the local authority is clear.

The BSF bidders

The final tenders from the two short-listed bidders were received in February this year and a decision will be made this year. The two bidders are Land Securities Trillium and RM (Research Machines, an IT company); and Catalyst Education (Birmingham) Ltd.
.
Land Securities is the UK’s biggest property company. This is what its website says:

‘In addition to LS Trillium’s 900 employees, a further 15,000 people help to ensure the smooth running of our customers’ workplaces, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. The most ‘visible’ services they provide include catering, cleaning and security. Less obvious, but equally vital services include gardening, porterage and engineering.

Whilst these 15,000 people generally wear the LS Trillium uniform, in fact they are employed by a series of specialist Service Partners organisations. We have long term contracts with these organisations to ensure we get the best value for money and highest possible service standards for our clients.’

In short, they have an army of subcontracted workers ready to take over Council services.

Catalyst Education (Birmingham) Ltd is a subsidiary of Catalyst Lend Lease and Bovis Lend Lease Ltd. Bovis Lend Lease is one of the world’s leading project management and construction companies.

‘The Catalyst business was founded by Bovis and the Bank of Scotland in the 1990s to bid for projects in Britain’s fast developing Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and Public Private Partnership (PPP) markets, a government backed programme that encourages private sector businesses to fund, build and manage public sector assets.

Separate consortia are formed for each PFI bid, with Bovis Lend Lease providing the construction expertise and a financial institution, usually the Bank of Scotland, acting as investment partner. Many projects, particularly in healthcare, also involve a soft facilities management provider and another group company, Vita Lend Lease, maintains the completed buildings.

In 2005 Catalyst Lend Lease was founded to oversee the development of the business, manage future bids and oversee the asset management of Lend Lease’s PFI and PPP investments in the UK. In 2006, Catalyst Investment Holdings Ltd was formed by Bovis Lend Lease Holdings Ltd and the Bank of Scotland to hold and manage the two businesses’ equity investments in 11 PFI projects.’ (Bovis website)

The vehicle through which the BSF project is to be run is the ‘Local Education Partnership’. The LEP is a joint venture company controlled by the private contractors who are awarded the contract. The composition of a LEP is: private contractor(s) 80%, Partnership for Schools (PfS – the DFES agency) 10%, BCC 10%. The contract will be for a period of up to 20 years.

This BSF programme carries 3 big threats :

1. Loss of services
The private sector regards the LEP, and the BSF programme in general, as a means of positioning themselves to gain access to the provision of educational and children’s services, and to use it as a springboard to bid for other Council services, cherry-picking the ones that are profitable.

2. Loss of jobs, worsening conditions
If services are outsourced many jobs in the City Council will disappear. The record of privatisation in the public sector is that pay is cut and conditions of employment are worsened in order to ensure profits for private companies.

3. Loss of democracy
Councils will come and go but the BSF consortium will remain for up to 20 years – which is likely to mean permanently in place. The LEP is supposed to be answerable to the Council, but it brings the logic of business methods and profitability into the heart of local government, and with it the danger that the tail will wag the dog – the LEP will impose its own logic on the Council.

Time is running short and the trade union movement in Birmingham, let alone the users of services, are still largely unaware of the threat that BSF poses. We have three urgent tasks: to find out what the BSF contract says about outsourcing; to spread information as fast and as widely as possible; and to gear up for a campaign to defend services against privatisation through BSF.

Academies

The second form of privatisation I want to talk about is Academies. I think everyone here knows what they are – in short:

• state schools
• secondary or all-through
• under private school legislation
• funded directly by government
• outside LEA
• run by private sponsors
• not for profit
• sponsors pay up to £2 million (often much less)
• government funding of up to £35 million for building
• government pays all future costs
• sponsor owns the land and buildings
• sponsor appoints a majority of the school governing body
• appoints and promotes staff
• freedom over staff pay and conditions
• freedom to devise the curriculum

In Birmingham 6 existing schools are planed to be replaced by Academies, with sponsors as follows:

Shenley Court and Heartlands – Edutrust (a newly-formed charity led by Lord Bhatia, which has never run a school)
St Albans’s and Harborne Hill – Ark (a charity set up by hedge fund investors.They already run several Academies in London))
Sheldon Heath – King Edward VI Foundation (who run several private and grammar schools in the city)
College High – sponsor not announced yet

In addition there is a seventh proposed Academy – the Eastside Creative Media and Arts Academy, and the threat, announced by the government last week, to turn some of the 27 so-called ‘failing’ schools into Academies.

So the stakes are very high. Academies aren’t run for profit (though who knows what a future government might do) but they are privatisation in the sense of handing over a public asset to private control. They also have damaging effects on neighbouring schools (for example by skewing their intakes to get more middle-class pupils and excluding high numbers of pupils). They are a threat to the very existence of a coherent and publicly-accountable secondary school system in Birmingham.

Why should we oppose Academies? For three reasons:
1. They won’t raise standards
2. They undermine local democracy and accountability
3. They are a threat to teachers’ and other school workers’ pay and conditions.
I haven’t time to go into all these in any detail, but briefly…

1. Standards

The government’s own commissioned evaluation, the Academies 4th Annual Report (PricewaterhouseCoopers July 2007) said the following:

‘…across the 21 Academies that were open in 2006, 40 per cent of pupils achieved Key Stage 4 Level 2 (5+ A*-C)… When compared to other similar schools, the level of performance in Academies in 2006 was similar to the two comparison groups (both 41 per cent compared to the Academy average of 40 per cent)… (PWC 2007, p36)

What the report is saying here is that Academies performed no better than similar schools which are not Academies. This is in spite of all the hype, all the extra funding, all the expertise which sponsors were supposed to bring. In short, it completely undermines the government’s claim that Academies do better.

Those that did improve did so for two main reasons: they changed their intake to admit more middle-class pupils (who tend to do better in exams), and they entered pupils for easier exams. See the Anti-Academies Alliance website for more information.

2. Democracy

A community school governing body has one-third elected parents, and places by right for elected staff representatives. An Academy governing body has a majority of governors appointed by the sponsor. There is only one place by right for an elected parent, and none at all for a staff governor.

Academies are not part of the local authority (in spite of the pretence by BCC) so they are not accountable to councillors or through the ballot box.

Edutrust and Ark, as well as many other sponsors, want to set up chains of Academies (in effect rivalling LEAs), in which case the key decisions are not made by the governing body but by the central board of trustees or directors.

Finally, the so-called consultation process is completely undemocratic, because the case against Academies is not allowed to be put and because the decision to have an Academy has already been made behind closed doors.

3. Workers’ pay and conditions

Academies are set up under private school legislation, so they are not bound by national pay and conditions agreements – in fact they don’t even have to recognise unions at all. Ark has just admitted, contrary to what BCC has been promising, that it won’t pay teachers on the national scales, and moves up the scale are dependent on their own performance management system. Teachers at two schools in Bolton and one in Derby are currently involved in strike action over pay if their schools become Academies.

Furthermore, any agreements or promises the sponsors make today they can break tomorrow, and there is nothing parents, school workers, students or Birmingham voters can do about, even though we pay for it through our taxes.

The Eastside Creative and Media Arts Academy

This is a proposal for a regional Academy in Birmingham, based in Eastside, geared to the ‘creative industries’, and admitting students at age 14 and 16. The sponsors are Birmingham City University (formerly the University of Central England) and the Ormiston Trust, a local company involved in both sponsoring Academies (2 in Sandwell, 1 in Walsall, 1 in Essex) and in the project management of Academy proposals.

All our arguments against Academies apply to this one, but there is one feature of the Eastside Academy which is different from all other Academies – it is going to select all its students. 300 pupils will be selected for admission at age 14 and the rest at 16. It claims that it will select by ‘aptitude’, but all the evidence about forms of selection indicates that they turn out to be forms of social selection. You just have to ask yourself, who will be the students most likely to demonstrate ‘aptitude’ in the arts? It will be those who have had the private music lessons, who go to ballet classes, who belong to drama groups – and they will predominantly be those students from middle-class backgrounds. In Birmingham 33% of pupils are on free school meals. How likely is it that 33% of the Eastside entrants will be? How likely that young people from poor areas such as the King’s Norton estate, with 45% on FSM, will be fairly represented? Isn’t it much more likely that the Academy will be more like a new grammar school in the city, specialising in the arts?

The Eastside Academy will damage other schools, in two ways. First, it will undermine other schools and colleges specialising in the arts – schools which do not have the luxury of creaming off the most talented students.

Second, it serves to legitimise the principle of selection on other grounds, so that it can be applied throughout the school system under the rubric of ‘diversity and choice’. It is no accident that two days after the Eastside Academy plan was launched by Birmingham City Council on 13 December 2007, Tony Howell said that some children should have the option to leave the classroom at 14 to learn a trade (BBC News 16 December). The consequence would be an even more socially-segregated school system.

The threat to the 27 Birmingham schools

Ed Balls, the current Secretary of State for Education, Children and Young People, announced last week that 638 secondary schools in England in which 30% of pupils did not achieve 5 ‘good’ GCSEs including English and maths in 2007 may be turned into Academies, into Trusts (a sort of Academy-lite), or closed. This applies to 27 schools here in Birmingham, which represents 36% of the City’s secondary capacity.

These 27 schools serve the poorest areas of the city and have high levels of FSM, yet the majority of them are succeeding against the odds. 18 of the 27 Birmingham schools have Contextual Value Added scores above the 1000 threshold (including five of the currently proposed academies), demonstrating that pupils are making above-average progress. The large majority of the 27 also have favourable Ofsted reports which praise the schools for improving. But in spite of this they are to be dragooned into becoming academies, trusts, to be twinned with ‘better performing schools’, or simply closed. Apparently the government will decide on their fate, on the basis of unknown criteria, in the autumn term. £400 million will be allocated to ‘support’ the 638 schools, but most of it is to pay for them to become academies and trusts, not to support teachers in the classroom.

This is a brutal attack on the school system in Birmingham, and in particular on working-class schools, which will throw the 27 schools into turmoil. Labour is ‘acting tough’ in order to shore up its failing school policies and impose more Academies and trusts. It attempts to be a ‘quick fix’ solution to the issue of raising standards of attainment in socially disadvantaged areas which contradicts everything we know about the process of improvement. It can only increase instability and anxiety in these schools, leading to demoralisation and problems of recruitment among students and staff.

AABA, the Alliance Against Birmingham Academies (which is supported by the NUT, NASUWT, ATL, Unison and GMB), has called for a collective response, rather than leaving each school to battle on in isolation, and a community response, in which every parent, every student, every citizen who is affected can participate. It has called on the Local Authority to arrange an initial meeting of governors, headteachers and teachers, school unions and parents’ organisations of the 27 schools as soon as possible.

So far the campaign against Academies in Birmingham has had only a limited response from teachers, parents and school workers, compared to campaigns elsewhere. This needs to change. We have been winning the battle of ideas – everyone in the country knows now how contentious the policy is – but we risk losing the struggle on the ground here in Birmingham. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of secondary schooling in Birmingham is at stake.

To contact the Alliance Against Birmingham Academies; phone 07842199352 or email no2academies@hotmail.co.uk