The Consolidation of the Basic Organisation in the Technical Base

The basic organisation of RCPB(ML) in the technical base began the New Year by embarking on a programme to consolidate itself. It did so on the basis that it would undertake whatever reorganisation was necessary in order to continue its work and step up its tempo. This is the content which it gave to the programme of consolidating itself and its work.

In its deliberations, the basic organisation established in the technical base reaffirmed the principle that the basic organisations of the Party are established where the work is, and that wherever the work is, basic organisations are necessary to lead that work. The basic organisations are not bureaucratic organisations. They are organs of class struggle at their level. This is also the case with the basic organisation in the technical base, whose remit is not to co-ordinate or manage the work, but to apply the line and programme of the Party and to elaborate it within the conditions in which it operates and within which the comrades militate. It is the forum and organisation within which the members of the basic organisation are trained to find their bearings in all conditions and circumstances.

Thus the basic organisation set its programme in a conscious and organised manner, in the context of the resolution of the National Consultative Conference 2000 of RCPB(ML) which had approved the work of the Party organisations, and called on the work undertaken since the Party’s 3rd Congress of March 1999 to be continued and consolidated.

The basic organisation was confident that in the course of its work, whatever the initial problems that it encountered, it would rise to the occasion and reflect its revolutionary quality in the quality of its work and transform this into concrete improvements so as to realise the line of the Party on this front of work.

Workers at the Rolls-Royce engineering factory at Ansty, near Coventry, staged a 24-hour strike on Friday, February 9, in protest at job losses. Talks between the workers’ representatives and the company had collapsed.

Workers picketed the plant as part of a campaign to halt hundreds of redundancies and the transfer of work to Canada.

The Manufacturing Science and Finance union said that the workers are being forced to take industrial action and there are alternatives to the redundancies. The MSF wants the company to withdraw redundancy notices and enter into "constructive talks".

"Rolls-Royce has pushed its staff into taking this action," said MSF general secretary Roger Lyons. "It has treated them with contempt by issuing compulsory redundancies and by refusing to listen to alternative proposals which were put forward."

The strike is the first at the plant for 20 years.

Steelworkers Vote to Strike

Steelworkers at the Scunthorpe plant in Lincolnshire have voted to strike in protest at compulsory job losses. The workers voted by 60% in favour of strikes and by 83% for industrial action short of a strike.

The ballot was called by the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation in protest at 100 compulsory redundancies announced at the factory last year by the steel monopoly Corus. Since then the monopoly has unveiled plans to cut more than 6,000 jobs across the country.

Michael Leahy, General Secretary of the ISTC, said: "The ballot result shows the mood of steelworkers. Corus can now see how angry their employees are because they feel betrayed and stabbed in the back by Corus executives. If Corus will not enter into meaningful dialogue with us we will have to show them that our members are in the mood to consider the argument of force."

Michael Leahy said, "We are working on a package which could save most of the jobs that Corus have said will go. We shall present to the company an alternative that could stem Corus's losses whilst keeping jobs and retaining the capacity which will be needed when market conditions improve."

The steel union leaders are optimistic that they have a plan to save the 6,050 jobs facing the axe at Corus’s plants at Llanwern, Ebbw Vale and Shotton in Wales and Teesside in the north east of England

A special steel conference held by the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union urged Corus to open negotiations over the future of the industry.

"Corus must come back to the negotiating table," said national officer Bob Shannon. "We are putting a package of realistic proposals together over the next few days." Bob Shannon said Corus should consider mothballing plants rather than closing them altogether.

Meanwhile Tony Blair insisted British manufacturing still had a strong future, despite the announcement from Corus. In a speech to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, Tony Blair acknowledged British manufacturers had been through "tough times" but said they had shown great resilience in coping with the difficulties.

He stressed the problems afflicting Corus were not confined to Britain and that there had been "huge restructuring" throughout the industrialised world as firms faced up to the challenges of globalisation and technological change.

The people of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques which is used as a bombing range by the US Navy are claiming more than $100m in damages from the Navy. The basis of their claim is that ammunition including depleted uranium (DU) shells have caused an epidemic of cancers there.

More than a third of the 9,000 inhabitants of Vieques have been found to be suffering from a range of serious illnesses and cancers, which doctors have linked to decades of bombing by the US and the military of other countries including the British Navy.

According to official Puerto Rican figures, cancer rates on the island are soaring, with the numbers of people suffering from cancer of the breast, cervix and uterus up by 300% over the past 20 years.

The court case brought by the islanders is one more example of the use of DU shells being linked with leukaemia cases. Other well known cases are those of the troops sent to Kosova and who participated in the Gulf War against Iraq, as well as the people of those countries who were exposed to the shell fire.

Campaigners on the island made an order through the Freedom of Information Act to force the Navy to publicly admit it had fired DU shells onto a range on the eastern tip of the island in 1999.

The Navy said this was done by mistake after the wrong ammunition was loaded onto a fighter jet and they made efforts to recover the radioactive shell casings afterwards. But, they then only managed to find around 50 of them.

Scientists, however, who have conducted soil samples on the ranges say they have found evidence of systematic bombing with DU shells going back at least a decade.

As many as 3,600 people on Vieques have been found to be suffering from illnesses linked to the decades of bombing on Vieques and the use of DU shells. One person, Rolando Garcia, is only 32 but looks nearer 50. His test results show him to be contaminated with a whole range of heavy metals, the most worrying being uranium.

Figures compiled in 1990-94 show that the 9,300 people of Vieques are 27% more likely to get cancer than those on Puerto Rico itself, just to the west. Dr Rafael Rivera-Castao, who lives on the island, says the rate has risen since then. "I estimate that the cancer rate here is now 52% more than the Puerto Rico average," he said.

WDIE totally condemns the criminal use of DU munitions, the use of which have been shown beyond doubt to be a war crime, and joins with all those who are demanding a ban on DU weapons, a full and thorough investigation into the effects of their use, and reparations to all those who have been harmed.