THE Blair government announced yesterday through its Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, that it was going to bring in legislation that will tell judges how the Human Rights Act is to be interpreted.
This will effectively end the role of the judiciary as the legal guardians of the interests of the British bourgeoisie as a whole, and turn them into government agents or government servants.
The immediate objective of the legislation is to end judicial objections to the government deporting who it wishes from this country, without proper consideration of their basic democratic rights, and without proper consideration as to whether they will be handed over to regimes that will torture and then murder those who have been deported.
The essential objective of the legislation will be to bring in the type of judge who will be willing to preside over no-jury courts, where the accused will not know the ‘evidence’ for the charges laid against him, nor where such ‘evidence’ comes from. The only thing that the accused will know about the trial is its verdict, which will almost certainly be guilty.
Presumably with each change of government there will be legal changes about how judges are to interpret the law, and a purge of the judiciary so as to get the kind of judge that the new government wants.
This is what Blair and Falconer are opening the door to.
The position of the News Line is clear – we are opposed to the capitalist state, root and branch.
We call for a socialist revolution to overthrow this weapon for the oppression of the working class by the ruling class.
We call for the smashing of the whole bourgeois state apparatus by a socialist revolution and for a workers’ state that will defend the interests of the majority and prepare the way for a socialist society.
HURRAH FOR THE BA SYMPATHY STRIKERS
News Line congratulates the BA sympathy strikers who have taken unofficial strike action in support of the 800 Gate Gourmet workers who have been locked out by the airline catering company which picked a fight with them because it intends to cut their wages, and destroy their terms and conditions of employment.
All BA workers, and all workers at London Airport, know that if the bosses succeed in beating down the Gate Gourmet workers, they will be next.
Their militancy and class consciousness is in absolute contradiction to the conduct of the TGWU leadership, headed by Tony Woodley.
Woodley and his cohorts are making it clear that their first priority is to get the unofficial strikers back to work.
To underline that, they have repudiated the unofficial strike and condemned it. Yesterday BA was giving all of its employees at the airport a copy of the repudiation.
Any trade union leadership worth its salt, with BA on the ropes and demanding a settlement, would be telling Gate Gourmet that it was not willing to talk to them, and would make no call to unofficial strikers to return to work, until all of the sacked Gourmet workers had been reinstated.
Only when that had happened would they be willing to meet the management to hear what they had to say.
Instead, the TGWU is to rush into talks which are based on getting the locked-out workers back to work on the basis of agreeing to measures that will make the company ‘viable’.
With the use of the word ‘viable’, the TGWU leaders are signalling that they are prepared to negotiate the changes that Gourmet want to make.
TGWU members must demand that the whole airport is stopped. Otherwise the wages and conditions of all airport workers will be destroyed in what the US trade unions call ‘a race to the bottom’.