Workers Solidarity Movement

Stormont was back to business last weekend as they laid down the red carpet for a top member of the Communist Party’s politburo Liu Yandong as part of the ongoing normalisation drive to showcase investment and job opportunities in in the North. Before it was pandering to US capital but with a stagnating economy our local ruling class are increasingly keen to build relations with the next emerging global power, China, which is increasingly flexing its muscles in the US sphere of influence.

Despite concerns raised by Patrick Corrigan of Amnesty International over the lack of human rights in China there was little hope of our first and deputy first ministers raising such concerns in our so-called new era where the interests of the few are put before the many. In this shiny new spectacle where spin is the order of the day, where even the Titanic tragedy is not immune from clutches of capital, you can forget about raising issues such as workers’ rights, poverty wages and prison abuse in China.

Our local ruling class are keen to sell Northern Ireland to the lowest bidder, promising a cheap and pacified workforce,  their class interests lay with state capitalist countries such as China.  Our interests and solidarity must lay with the growing and militant migrant workers movement in China and across South East Asia which is moving beyond the suffocating trade union bureaucracy and presenting a new challenge to the status-quo. We must do the same!