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 Charity calls for stop to ‘evil practice’ of detaining under 16s for minor offences which causes trauma to the child

Amelia Hill

guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 June 2011 22.04 BST

Thousands of children under the age of 16 in the UK are being detained in prison cells overnight.

Thousands of children under 16 are being held overnight in police cells every year, figures reveal.

At least 53,000 children under the age of 16 were held overnight in police cells in 2008 and 2009, including 13,000 children aged between nine and 13, according to figures obtained by the Howard League for Penal Reform from half the police forces in England and Wales. The charity called the practice “evil” and urged that it be stopped.

Channel 4 News, which will report on the research on Tuesday, discovered those detained overnight in cells included a 16-year-old girl arrested for stealing a can of lager and a girl of 13 who stole a make-up bag.

Nine of the children detained between 2008 and 2009 were under the age of criminal responsibility, which is 10 in England and Wales. There were 1,674 children aged 10 or 11; an age group covered by legal safeguards designed to limit the likelihood of them being detained overnight. Almost 11,500 were children under 14, the European average age of criminal responsibility.

“I was horrified to discover how prevalent the practice is across the country. Thousands of children are detained for at least one night in police cells ever year,” said Frances Crook, the director of the Howard League. “A police cell is not an appropriate place for children. This is an evil practice and must stop.”

Crook said she feared the actual numbers might be much higher. Although the charity asked all 43 police forces in England and Wales for figures under freedom of information rules, only half responded. The Metropolitan police were among the forces which refused to release data.

“We may actually be talking hundreds of thousands of children detained overnight each year,” said Crook.

The FoI requests reveal that the practice varies wildly across the country. Greater Manchester police held nearly 4,000 girls and nearly 13,000 boys for the night in its police cells in a year. Kent police held 2,700 boys and girls overnight. Nottinghamshire held 1,300. Norfolk, however, only held 122 children overnight in the same year.

Crook said most children detained are not serious offenders. “It appears children are being held in police cells for child protection reasons, for example when a child is found in the street drunk. This could be an increasing response to children in need as local authorities face cuts to children’s services,” she said. “We’re dealing with children who are in need.”

Anita Dockley, research director for the charity, blamed failures in the referral process from police custody to local authority accommodation. “This referral process is a vital safeguard for children who are charged and whose bail is refused by the police. But police admitted to us that requests by them for local authority accommodation are often not met.”

This is, she pointed out, contrary to international law, which states that “no child should be deprived of his or her liberty unless it is a measure of last resort”.

Some police forces admit concern over the numbers and are trying alternative approaches. In 2006, Hull was third in a national league table of local authorities sending children under the age of 18 to custody. But it had little impact on re-offending, said commander Keith Hunter of Hull police. He introduced full time youth justice workers into his police custody suite. Now in its third year, the scheme steers away from the criminal justice system through age-appropriate alternatives, including counselling, supported return to school, anger management and alcohol awareness training. The programme has halved the number of child detentions in Hull.

Other figures support Crook’s claim that children are being unnecessarily arrested and detained. At least a quarter of a million children were arrested last year – including 22,135 aged 10 to 13 – but only 81,500 were sentenced by a court and only 4,200 were sentenced to custody. This, said Crook, “suggests that for two thirds of children who are put through the trauma and indignity of an arrest and detention in a police station, it was unnecessary”.

Andy Adams, speaking for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: “As with adults, detention of children in custody is authorised for a number of reasons, including to further a criminal investigation, to uncover the identity of any suspects or because the disappearance of that person would hinder any prosecution. The rules for the detention of suspects are set down in law and on every occasion must be authorised by a custody officer.

“Detentions of both children and adults in police custody are reviewed regularly to ensure that they are being held in accordance with the law and not for any longer than required for police investigations.”

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Syria next on US/UK Hitlist – what’s really happening??

Youtube Video:

Article from Proletarian:

http://www.cpgb-ml.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=728

Red Youth is saddened to learn of the death of comrade Ludo on Sunday. Ludo was a great teacher of the science of Marxism Leninism. Ludo was the builder of the Workers Party of Belgium and a staunch anti-imperialist. When revisionism seemed triumphant Ludo Martens struggled tirelessly with his comrades to raise high the banner of Marxism Leninism. A great defender of the revolutionary example of Joseph Stalin his book Another View of Stalin was and remains an inspiration to new generations of communist revolutionaries. We send a red salute in his memory to our comrades in the PTB and Comac,

Long live the name of Ludo Martens, the defender of Marxism Leninism!

Red Salute!

Comrade Harpal Brar, chairman of the CPGB-ML elucidates the party’s position on the latest imperial adventure in North Africa – namely the criminal and ongoing slaughter unleashed on the people of Libya. He explains why the only correct position for the British working-class to take is the slogan “Hands off Libya”, “Victory to the resistance”, “Victory to Gadaffi”!

The decision of the TUC to invite Labour leader Ed Miliband to speak on the platform on 26 March is a slap in the face for the working class and should be condemned by all who are serious about building a real anti-cuts resistance movement.

Even before the well-deserved collapse of Labour at the last elections the labour aristocrats were busy painting Labour in pretty colours. Labour‘s cuts, they sighed, whilst regrettable, were largely unavoidable, and in any case preferable to Tory cuts. Ditto Labour’s union bashing, Labour’s privatisation rampage and Labour’s genocidal wars.

With Labour out of office, the leadership election was the next burning question of the day for the TUC, eclipsing the ‘minor’ question of mobilising against the austerity juggernaut rumbling over the horizon. Despite pressure from several unions calling for the TUC to coordinate resistance efforts, the accession of ‘Red Ed’ on a phony ‘left’ platform was greeted with a sigh of relief from the opportunists.

At last they could revert to the old formula: a few ritual protests against the ConDems to let off steam until such time as Labour crawls back. Meanwhile, keep pouring members’ subs into Labour party coffers and keep the seat warm for social democracy.

How the TUC ‘leads’ workers – by the nose

Five months after Osborne’s spending review, the TUC stirs in its sleep. Once again, it is time to march to the top of the hill, hear some faked-up ‘fire in the belly’ from the Labour ‘lefts’, sieve through Miliband’s utterances in search for some ‘progressive’ fool’s gold, then march down again.

The TUC pamphlet invites us to march for the ‘alternative’, but by this is meant not socialism, but a better regulated and managed capitalism. It invites us to march against “unfair“, “unnecessary” cuts – giving a free hand to today’s Labour councillors and any future Labour government to implement cuts that can be dressed up as ‘fair’ and ‘necessary’.

It tells us that the “ConDem” cuts are ideologically driven and not warranted by the actual depth of the crisis. Yet when Keynesian solutions all fail, as sooner or later they must, then it is indeed the crisis itself that dictates the cuts. The Tories may lean slightly harder on the accelerator than Labour would in their place, but they are all heading off the same cliff.

What the TUC can never admit is that behind the debt crisis lies a deep-seated overproduction crisis. More commodities are being produced than can be sold at a profit on the market. The problem is aggravated when capitalists, desperate to beat the competition, intensify the exploitation of workers, thereby further reducing their spending power.

There are two possible capitalist responses to this dilemma. Efforts can be made to revive demand by various methods, all of which are founded on increasing debt, storing up worse problems down the line.

The other capitalist response, in the end a necessary evil if the capitalist system is to survive, is to free the market of glut by closing down enterprises, laying off workers and slashing wages and welfare, initially through cut-throat competition between rival blocs of monopoly capital and ultimately through war.

The TUC wants us to believe that the only real problem is the over-privileged public schoolboys who are currently in charge. Get Labour back in minus the Blairites, it says, and we can all unite, swallow whatever cuts Labour deems ‘fair’ and ‘necessary’, and get on with ‘growing our way out of the recession’.

“Cuts are not the cure,” declaims the TUC’s flier, reassuring us besides that the illness is not life-threatening anyway. Don’t worry about Britain’s national debt, it twitters. “All countries have a debt – there is nothing dangerous about that.”

Just look how much we borrowed from America after the second world war, and we took ages to pay that back! Why, the current debt blip is really nothing to panic about. And in so far as there’s a problem, we can extricate ourselves from it with some moderate belt-tightening, the creation of some ‘green’ jobs and some mild restraints on bankers’ bonuses.

This whistling in the dark ignores the real character of the crisis and the real historical context. After World War Two capitalism was recovering from overproduction crisis. Right now, having already used every possible stratagem to evade the consequences of market glut, imperialism is entering the most acute phase of the crisis. The parallel is 1929, not 1945.

Massive surplus capacity stifles all markets, the US is too busy trying to rescue itself to throw anyone else a credit line, and on past performance only war, revolution or both will shift the logjam. Capitalism is in a hole and cannot stop digging.

Break the link with Labour

The only cure for the crisis ripping through Britain is socialism. Those who pretend it is possible to duck the consequences of a crisis more than 30 years in the making by tinkering with the existing capitalist system are practising a cruel deceit upon workers, blowing smoke in their eyes as capitalism prepares an all-out class war assault in defence of its profits.

Union militants have increasingly sought alternative ways of mobilising, notably within the National Shop Stewards Network. When the cuts announcement in October drew nothing more from the TUC than talk of a demo the following March, the NSSN mobilised its own protests, where Bob Crow and others denounced Labour’s record of treachery.

In January the NSSN announced its intention to put organised labour at the heart of the anti-cuts movement, on the basis of opposition to all cuts. This line, if consistently followed, will set the anti-cuts movement on a healthy and instructive collision course with Labour, hundreds of whose local councillors are currently implementing the so-called “ConDem cuts“.

There is no more divisive force in our movement than the Labour party. Every step towards breaking the link with Labour is a step closer to uniting workers in resistance to capitalism.

Via Information Clearing House. Translated by Professor Sam Hamod. 5 April 2011

For 40 years, or was it longer, I can’t remember, I did all I could to give people houses, hospitals, schools, and when they were hungry, I gave them food. I even made Benghazi into farmland from the desert. I stood up to attacks from that cowboy Reagan.

When he killed my adopted orphaned daughter, he was trying to kill me; instead he killed that poor innocent child. Then I helped my brothers and sisters from Africa with money for the African Union, did all I could to help people understand the concept of real democracy, where people’s committees ran our country. But that was never enough, as some told me.

Even people who had 10-room homes, new suits and furniture, were never satisfied. As selfish as they were they wanted more, and they told Americans and other visitors, they needed ‘democracy’, and ‘freedom’, never realising it was a cut-throat system, where the biggest dog eats the rest.

They were enchanted with those words, never realising that in America, there was no free medicine, no free hospitals, no free housing, no free education and no free food, except when people had to beg or go to long lines to get soup.

No, no matter what I did, it was never enough for some. But for others, they knew I was the son of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the only true Arab and muslim leader we’ve had since Salah ad-Din.

When Nasser claimed the Suez Canal for his people, as I claimed Libya for my people, it was in his footsteps I tried to follow, to keep my people free from colonial domination – from thieves who would steal from us …

Now, I am under attack by the biggest force in military history. My little African son Obama wants to kill me, to take away the freedom of our country: to take away our free housing, our free medicine, our free education, our free food, and replace it with American-style thievery, called ‘capitalism’.

But all of us in the Third World know what that means. It means corporations run the countries, run the world, and the people suffer. So there is no alternative for me; I must make my stand, and if Allah wishes, I shall die by following his path – the path that has made our country rich with farmland, with food and health, and even allowed us to help our African and Arab brothers and sisters to work here with us, in the Libyan Jamahiriya.

I do not wish to die, but if it comes to that, to save this land, my people, all the thousands who are all my children, then so be it. Let this testament be my voice to the world: that I stood up to crusader attacks of Nato, stood up to cruelty, stood up to betrayal, stood up the West and its colonialist ambitions. And that I stood with my African brothers, my true Arab and muslim brothers, as a beacon of light.

When others were building castles, I lived in a modest house, and in a tent. I never forgot my youth in Sirte. I did not spend our national treasury foolishly, and like Salah ad-Din, our great muslim leader, who rescued Jerusalem for Islam, I took little for myself …

In the West, some have called me ‘mad’ or ‘crazy’. They know the truth but continue to lie. They know that our land is independent and free, not in the colonial grip; that my vision, my path, is and has been clear and for my people, and that I will fight to my last breath to keep us free.

May Allah almighty help us to remain faithful and free.

March 26 saw well in excess of the reported 250,000 people march through London against the public spending cuts which are now being pushed through by the Tory – Lib Dem coalition. The mainstream news media took the opportunity to report that the TUC inspired demonstration was not called to oppose the cuts, but merely asked for an ‘alternative’ to them. To the delight of the capitalist media Brendan Barber and others spoke at length about the unfairness of the cuts but did not dare to challenge the capitalist foundations of the current crisis and the inherent flaws in a system that is based upon the exploitation of man by man. Barber and the TUC hierarchy, far from wanting to bring about any real opposition to the cuts, provided the financial and organisational means to mobilise hundreds of thousands of workers who were promptly marched from their coaches to Hyde Park and back again! In doing so, Barber and the TUC effectively act as a pressure release valve for capitalism. The anger and resentment which confronts capitalism and which had motivated many thousands to protest was allowed to dissipate, frustrated and exploited workers could blow off some steam as they passed through London on a spring afternoon.

Despite the class treachery of the union leaderships, those who marched on the 26^th will have learnt important lessons. The sheer size of the march (which lasted for well over 4 hours) will have confirmed in the minds and hearts of those in attendance that a genuine fight-back is possible. The material conditions exist for a fight-back as does the will to oppose the cuts; all that is lacking is the necessary leadership.

In Hyde Park Labour leader Ed Miliband clutched at every cliché going, he lurched from the suffragettes to the anti-apartheid movement and even threw in the odd mention to the American civil rights movement! He said that “Our struggle is to fight to preserve, protect and defend the best of the services we cherish because they represent the best of the country we love “and went on to call for ‘homes fit for heroes’! By heroes we believe he didn’t mean the masses of hard working middle and working-class people gathered in Hyde Park, but rather the scores of unfortunate men and women who are returned each year in body bags and wheel chairs from Labour’s last couple of colonial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq!

After years of privatisation under Labour, many of those in attendance were sympathetic to calls to ‘Break the link’ with Labour and the CPGB-ML distributed 10,000 copies of our leaflet ‘No to ALL capitalist cuts’. If we really want to build a movement that can fight the cuts we have to understand that capitalist overproduction crisis lies at the heart of the recurring economic meltdowns. To bury this outmoded system once and for all will require a bitter struggle against capitalism, against the influence of capital in the labour movement and this begins with a struggle to break organised labour from the vice-like grip of the Labour Party and all those who wish to organise an ‘alternative’ programme of cuts, privatisations, lay-offs and wars! Perhaps Mr Miliband failed to see the irony when he quoted Martin Luther King at the end of his speech:

“The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice”!

Check out this video:

Lesley Mercer of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy told the TUC Congress in September that “the future of the NHS is less clear than at any time since 1948” (our emphasis). Moving a composite motion which was seconded by Unison and adopted unanimously by Congress, Lesley said that it was important to maintain a “service which is publicly provided, publicly funded and publicly accountable … the [government] proposals represent the biggest gamble with the nation’s health and the taxpayers’ money that we have seen”.

Whilst Proletarian is happy to see the beginnings of what it hopes will become a determined counter-offensive against the government’s proposals to privatise the NHS, we would put the case somewhat differently. The government White Paper Liberating the NHS makes the future of the NHS plainly clear; this government, like the last, seeks to carve up the NHS with a butchering knife and then take the pieces to market, where they can be haggled and paraded before the profiteers, swindlers, fat cats and speculators.

The White Paper is quite clearly a programme to fragment and privatise the health service. To make the swill more enticing to the city pigs, the ConDems propose £20bn of spending cuts by 2014; that’s the government’s garnish to make the cheque books come out. The latest edition of campaigning newspaper Health Emergency carried the following observations in its lead article:

“The cost of implementing the White Paper (upwards of £1.7bn) seems like a classic waste of money much better spent on patient care. But from the point of view of Andrew Lansley and his Tory colleagues, if it resulted in denationalising the NHS, reversing the great legacy of Nye Bevan, and opening up a new £100bn market to private companies, it would be seen as money well spent.” (‘Say NO to the ConDem rationing boards’, Autumn 2010, our emphasis)

The final comment from the authors of Health Emergency is what lies at the heart of this matter. Tories are no more opposed to the ‘legacy of Nye Bevan’ than Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, the brothers Miliband or even good-old ‘comrade’ Abbott and the rest of their Labour cronies. What the ruling class (and whichever of their parliamentary stooges are currently representing them in government) is interested in, is an avenue of profitable investment; a chance to make cash.

It certainly isn’t the case that they want to get rid of the NHS out of some urge for revenge upon poor old long-deceased Nye Bevan. And it most definitely isn’t the case that this wouldn’t have happened under Nye’s inheritors in the Labour party!

Just two years ago, Proletarian covered an eerily similar set of proposals contained in the 2008 Darzi Report, which was all about coded privatisation. As we observed at the time:

“The focus of Darzi’s vision for the NHS is ostensibly the quality of care over the quantity. In real terms, this means a steady erosion of the treatments that can be expected to be provided free of charge at the point of delivery.

“Already, certain drugs are deemed too expensive for the NHS, no matter how much the patient may need them. This is just the tip of the treatment iceberg.

“Unsurprisingly, the report is essentially a gateway for privatisation. Further use of ‘market forces’ will serve as evidence for the ‘need’ for greater private investment and the withering away of free health care as a right …

“Lord Darzi believes that the time has come to address the issue of ‘quality’ in health care because the Labour government has now ‘done the investment’. Darzi tells us that there are now enough doctors and nurses, that waiting lists are being removed, and that it is now time to focus on the quality of their work.

“The investment has indeed been huge. Unfortunately, the money spent has done almost nothing to remedy years of underinvestment, but has instead flowed directly into the pockets of the drug companies and the multitude of private profiteers who are making fortunes by providing extortionately-priced (and often poor-quality) ‘services’ to the NHS, whether they be cleaning wards, sterilising surgical instruments or building new hospitals …

“The reality of Labour’s investment in the NHS is the pouring of millions of pounds into capitalist pockets, especially through the notorious PFIs (see Proletarian 23), certainly not an investment in the quality or quantity of the health care provided to the end user.” (‘Labour sharpens the privatisation knife’, August 2008)

Liberating the NHS is nothing more than a continuation of the policy of the previous administration. It’s about liberating capital. Liberating the currently restricted potential for private finance to pick and choose which members of our society will receive the care they need, based on their ability to pay. The government (of whichever hue) can dress it up as ‘liberation’, ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’, or make it an issue about the ‘quality of care’, but in the final analysis it’s all about the profit motive.

Health Emergency provided a succinct few paragraphs detailing some of the proposed changes in the White paper: “It aims to abolish the existing commissioning organisations – 152 Primary Care Trusts and 10 Strategic Health Authorities – and hand the main responsibility for commissioning services with a combined budget of £80bn to GPs. GPs will be required by their contract to be members of around 500 local ‘consortiums’, which will be statutory bodies to carry out the responsibilities of commissioning. They will receive a management allowance to allow them to buy in support, which may be from former NHS employees or from the private sector.”

So all those salaried unionised workers currently fulfilling this vital work will be given the heave-ho and transferred to new companies appointed by GPs and their ‘consortiums’. The pensions, rates of pay, terms and conditions will be gone, and in their place will come a pack of extremely aggressive capitalists, ready to mop up the cash.

The paper continued: “A new NHS Commissioning Board will be established to commission primary care services, specialist care and maternity services. It will oversee the GP consortiums, and have powers to assign GPs to a consortium if they have not already joined one [some ‘freedom’! – Ed]. It will have regional offices, and will employ NHS managers – but it is not known how many. The 90 plus NHS Trusts which are not yet Foundation Trusts will have to achieve Foundation status, or become part of a larger Foundation Trust by 2013, when the legal status of NHS Trust will be abolished. The ‘cap’ that limits the proportion of Foundation Trust income that can be derived from private medicine or contracts with the private sector will be removed.”

Therefore it seems quite clear that those medicines that the patient may need will make way for those that make most economic ‘sense’, ‘consortiums’ like the fat cats who’ll run them will be engrossed by margins and revenues instead of patient need and ‘quality of care’. Furthermore, “Foundation Trusts … will be encouraged to negotiate local variations on national pay and terms and conditions.”

GP consortia and the NHS Commissioning Board will buy in health care from “any willing provider” – Foundation Trusts, social enterprises or the for-profit private sector. Competition law will apply. Patients must be given free choice of GP (not restricted to where they live), choice of any provider, choice of named consultant team, and choices in maternity care, mental health, diagnostic testing, long-term conditions and end-of-life care, which all sounds perfectly lovely until one considers the effect that ‘parental choice’ has had on our schools! In the doublespeak of the capitalist class, ‘choice’ is a veiled term for rationing – a way to gradually focus the ever-diminishing public resources on those practices and services frequented by the middle classes, while the ‘choice’ by default of the majority of working-class people will be the crumbling, overstretched and under-resourced leftovers.

Performance targets including waiting times are to be scrapped. The public health and health promotion functions of Primary Care Trusts are to be taken over by local government through new ‘health and wellbeing boards’, which will also take over the role of councils’ oversight and scrutiny of local health services. The patient voice is also to be changed again: Local Involvement Networks (LINks) are to be replaced by new Healthwatch groups funded by local government, which will take on additional roles to make them “more like a ‘citizen’s advice bureau’ for health and social care”. (DH)

The White Paper is out to consultation until October. Most of its proposals are for swift implementation, and all of the proposals are to be carried through before 2014.

If we truly want to find a way of fighting back then we have to challenge the link that ties our movement to the whims of the Labour party, the very people who did everything they could to bring us to this calamitous moment. The results of this attack will be tremendous, not only for the terms and conditions of a million plus workers, but for the future health of our nation.

These are not ‘efficiency savings’ and the situation we face is not ambiguous. This is all about a sacrifice at the altar of finance capital, and the British proletariat, bound by Labour and Tory anti-union legislation, is the sacrificial lamb. These cuts are just the beginning; they’re just the first fumbling efforts of our ruling class to make ordinary people pay for the crisis of capitalism.

Proletarian urges all its readers and supporters to get behind the various local campaigns and resistance movements, take a Marxist analysis to these movements, build a vanguard revolutionary party and turn our attentions to an all out attack on those who would impoverish the workers.

‘Fair’ cuts? NO cuts! Take the fight to capitalism!

Break the link with Labour!

taken from October issue of Proletarian 2010

As the US/UK/EU imperialist armada is again mobilised to rob yet another middle eastern nation of its oil, and the BBC, CNN, ABC, Sky, and even Al Jazeera media pipe their propaganda in support of imperialism’s crimes, this excellent statement should be spread far and wide.

Don’t be intimidated, say it loud:

Hands off Libya: victory to Gaddafi
Issued by: CPGB-ML
Issued on: 11 March 2011

Download statement as a PDF

The CPGB-ML calls for support for the Libyan government in its fight to crush attempts to take control of Libyan oil out of the hands of the Libyan people.

We must resist attempts by foreign powers, especially western imperialists, who, in the interests of gaining control over its oil resources, want to Balkanise Libya, or to turn it into a client state and a base for attacking the democratic movements now surging in the rest of the Arab world and Africa.

Attempts by the imperialist media to portray the Libyan government in the same light as those of the puppet dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain are totally fraudulent, as are attempts to depict the opponents of the Libyan regime as rising up in the interests of freedom alongside the peoples of those Arab countries that are clients of western imperialism.

To compare Libya with Tunisia, Egypt or Bahrain is to compare chalk with cheese. To start with, Libya has a standard of living comparable to Britain’s – one of the highest in Africa. Not bad for a country that in 1951 was officially the poorest in the world.

Yes, Libya has acquired oil wealth since then, but this does not lead automatically to a high standard of living for the population: one has only to look at Nigeria or Equatorial Guinea, where the exploitation of oil resources has led to a dramatic fall in general living standards.

Gains of the revolution

Under the Gaddafi regime in Libya, women have gained full legal equality with men. Everybody has enough food on the table and every Libyan is provided with decent rent-free housing, has free access to good quality health care and to education services. This is hardly the situation in those countries of the Arab world that meet with imperialist approval!

James Petras has very well explained the imperialist oppression to which these countries are subjected, which leads directly to the dire poverty of most of the population and the intense frustration of the middle class:

“… most of the Arab economies where the revolts are taking place are based on ‘rents’ from oil, gas, minerals and tourism, which provide most of the export earnings and state revenues. These economic sectors are, in effect, export enclaves employing a tiny fraction of the labour force … [they] do not have links to a diversified productive domestic economy: oil is exported and finished manufactured goods as well as financial and high tech services are all imported and controlled by foreign multinationals and ex-pats linked to the ruling class …

“Rent-based income may generate great wealth, especially as energy prices soar, but the funds accrue to a class of ‘rentiers’ who have no vocation or inclination for deepening and extending the process of economic development and innovation …

“Beyond pillaging the public treasury, the ruling clan-class promotes ‘free trade’, ie, importing cheap finished products, thus undermining any indigenous domestic start-ups in the ‘productive’ manufacturing, agricultural or technical sector.” (‘Roots of the Arab revolts and premature celebrations’, axisoflogic.com, 3 March 2011)

In such countries, the ruling class that facilitates the imperialist pillage of its country enjoys luxury beyond all dreams, while the poor have nothing but their religion to console them. This simply is not the situation in Libya, where the oil wealth has been used to provide a high standard of living for the people.

Opponents of the regime

Why then are we now witnessing civil war in Libya?

Gaddafi’s regime is far from acceptable to all Libyans, notwithstanding the fact that it is not at all an economic failure. It has to be remembered that Gaddafi has been leading his country out of feudalism into the modern world, and the vested interests of the old regime don’t much like this.

Feudal tribal chiefs do not like to see their power ebbing away. Their religious ideologues do not like to see a society arising that rejects their medievalist tenets, such as women’s inferiority and a predilection for cruel and unusual punishments for crimes – dating from the times when nomadic societies had no resources to develop more humane methods of dealing with offenders.

And of course, since as yet the world has never known a society that is capable of providing to all its members everything that they need, there will always be people who are disgruntled enough to be mobilised – against their own interests – by reactionaries making all kinds of empty promises in their endeavour to overturn progressive regimes. In Libya today, unemployment is a problem, even if hunger is not.

Oil and imperialism

Most of the country’s problems are centred in the east, around Benghazi – the area, incidentally, which is the centre of Libya’s oil industry. This region is in the part of the country called Cyrenaica, home to the Senoussi clan to which King Idriss, the puppet of British imperialism who was overthrown by Gaddafi’s coup, belonged.

It is obvious that clan loyalties that no longer have any relevance in the modern world have been conjured up by reactionaries hoping to recapture their lost glory, no doubt with appeals to the most medieval of religious traditions.

Western imperialism, outraged by Libya’s nationalisation of its oil under Gaddafi, and by Gaddafi’s unfailing support for anti-imperialist causes (South Africa, Palestine, Ireland etc), has also always opposed the Gaddafi regime, and will certainly have been making contacts among disaffected sections of the Libyan population, waiting for happier days when enough forces could be mustered for overthrow of the Libyan government from within.

Defence of the revolution

In these circumstances, it should be obvious that for the Gaddafi regime to survive at all and to continue implementing its progressive programme, it had to resort to repression of its most dangerous enemies.

We are in no position to say whether or not that repression was taken too far since we have no evidence either way, but to fail to suppress dangerous enemies of the revolution – and to take timely measures firmly to discourage ordinary people from being seduced by their weasel words – would certainly amount to betraying the revolution and the people.

Friends of Libya have, in recent years, been alarmed at the concessions Gaddafi felt constrained to make to the outrageous demands of western imperialism in order to break the vice of sanctions that was beginning to destroy the social gains that had been so painstakingly built up.

We have not been happy that Libya should have accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie affair, although the evidence is perfectly clear that this had nothing to do with Libya. We are even less happy that Libya gave up its right to develop an independent nuclear industry.

However, whatever concessions Libya has made with a gun pointed at its head, it has still not descended to the level of a client state in the way that Egypt and Tunisia had, or Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or Yemen.

In order to ensure Gaddafi’s defeat, western imperialism has already begun imposing economic sanctions that include freezing Libyan assets abroad. Now it is seriously considering military intervention, initially in the form of imposing no fly-zones over Libya’s sovereign territory – a clear act of war.

SAS officers have been intercepted trying to provide military support to insurgents, while the French imperialist government has already leapt in to ‘recognise’ the council formed in the east of Libya, led by former minister Mustafa Jalil, which is fighting for the government’s overthrow.

Some people and organisations, such as Stop the War, have been bamboozled by the non-stop and ubiquitous Goebbelsian propaganda that has spewed forth from the imperialist media ever since Gaddafi’s regime was put in place into believing that he is some kind of a monster who must be overthrown at all costs. In view of his record in defending the interests of the Libyan people, such an approach is absurd.

Stop the War, dominated as it is by organisations that devote themselves to spreading illusions in social democracy (ie, futile hopes that solutions for the working class and oppressed people are to be found within capitalism), still finds itself cheerleading for Gaddafi’s opponents: their only reason for opposing imperialist military intervention is that it may be harmful to the cause of imperialism’s local agents in Libya!

Down with social-democratic treachery; down with imperialism!

VICTORY TO THE LIBYAN REVOLUTION; VICTORY TO GADDAFI!

HANDS OFF LIBYA!