Workers Solidarity Movement

Housing Executive workers held a successful lunchtime protest yesterday outside their offices in Adelaide street in Belfast city centre to demand their bosses keep to their commitment that a £250 payment be given to low-paid workers who earn less than £21,000 per year. 

Since the new year Belfast has been in the midst of a violent spree of car hijackings across the city mainly targeting vulnerable women. Behind the media spotlight and PSNI spin machine is a deeper context, one where where theose if power are quite contented to confine and manage ’crime’ in working class areas as long as it stays there.

A few thousand people took part in the 40^th anniversary Bloody Sunday march demanding real truth and justice after the publishing of the Saville report this year which confirmed that the massacre was ’unjustifiable and unjustified.’

This years march clearly divided the families and relatives of the Bloody Sunday Trust with the majority deciding to end the march with some pressure being concerted by Sinn Fein. Despite attempts by the political class to co-opt and de-radicalise the march and brush it under the carpet as part of the new shiny image of Northern Ireland there was a better than expected turnout, the Irish Times estimated 3,000 took part. Derry anarchists and the WSM were present along with a host of political and social organisations including the Independent Workers Union.

The PSNI new strategy of 'pizza n peelers' covered in a recent edition of the Andersonstown News, is a cynical and laughable stunt to win over young people and highlights how much they are out of touch in our communities. Despite the cosmetic changes and a propaganda blitz waged by the media and Sinn Fein apologists, the continuity RUC/ PSNI like any police force is political, to defend the power and wealth of the ruling class. Quite simply it is the state’s physical and intimidatory means of maintaining a desired status quo in society; one of socio-economic divisions and inequalities.

SDLP leader Dr Alasdair McDonnell has claimed that Stormont assembly members should be entitled to a ‘small increment’ on their 43,000 basic salary a year and better pension payments to keep them from ‘poverty’ in retirement. Yet again one rule for them and another for the rest of us as these gangsters on the hill expect us to bear the brunt of their vicious cuts in jobs and services being imposed by all our local political parties at the behest of their masters from Westminster.

This year marks the ten year anniversary of the continuity RUC/PSNI with former Chief Constable Hugh Orde once referring to the force as the ‘most democratic, accountable police service in the world.’ However, despite the cosmetic changes and window dressing the reality on the ground in working class communities is in stark contrast to the propaganda media blitz waged by the status-quo.

There were angry scenes at Belfast city hall recently as the Sinn Fein Lord Mayor Niall Ó Donnghaile refused to present a Duke of Edinburgh award to an army cadet. The heated debate inside coincided with an angry loyalist mob outside who attacked cars outside claiming this was an attack on their community. It brought back memories of the sectarian cockpit of city hall politics of the 1980s.

Saturday night pensioner Francis Morgan began tearing down the wooden boarding at the disused Transport House union building in Belfast city centre to demand rights for homeless people.

'I am a Belfast man born and bred and I want to bring the heart back into the city. I want to open this building as a shelterter for the homeless until the end of March.... this union building belongs to its members and I am calling on them to give this building for the homeless,' he told the Irish News.

Up to 200,000 public sector workers took part in the one day industrial action across Northern Ireland along with millions in the rest of the UK. Trains and buses were halted along with about 400 schools being closed with Irish Congress of Trade Unions assistant general secretary Peter Bunting predicting at the rally that ‘people are going away more determined to oppose the cuts coming down the line.’

Despite a concerted propaganda campaign waged by the mainstream media and the corrupt political class tens of thousands of public sector workers in Northern Ireland will be taking to the picket lines this Wednesday joining millions across the UK in the biggest single strike action since the 1926 general strike.