The right to demonstrate, to strike, to trial by jury in Britain are all elementary civil liberties, yet most of them have already been whittled away. Now the so-called “war on terror” is being used to destroy what little is left. This assault on our democratic rights is not a secondary matter. The democracy afforded us by capitalism is restricted, but we can no more ignore the attacks launched on our political rights than we can attacks on our jobs, wages and conditions.
“I was a member of the British Labour party
for some years and seeing that old man being manhandled the way he was out of
the Labour conference made my blood boil and almost brought me to tears.”
The idea that Brown
has been secretly opposed to privatisation, to the war in Iraq, to the Labour
government’s assault on civil liberties ‑ but keeping quiet through ‘loyalty’
(to his career that is, not to the Labour Party or working class Labour voters)
‑ is patently absurd. Both should go.
The 2005 Labour Party
Conference marks a significant shift in the situation in Britain. It deserves careful study by Marxists and by every
trade union and Labour activist. It was chiefly marked by a sharp conflict
between the Party leadership and the trade unions
Anyone
who doubted the wider implication for civil liberties of Blair’s ‘anti-terror’
legislation need look no further than the Labour Party Conference in Brighton.
82-year-old Walter Wolfgang, who fled Nazi Germany in 1937, was roughly
manhandled out of the hall by a pair of heavies