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Morning StarFor peace & socialism Incorporating the Daily Worker Friday January 19 2018
Tory donor bustedMillionaire who bankrolls Tories keeps getting into trouble
with the ads watchdog, writes SOLOMON HUGHES: P8
WORLD: P6
Heavy storm batters Europe
FEATURE: P9
Privateers set sights on child services
TENNIS: P15
Heatwave puts players at risk
STRUGGLING NHS FADES ON LIFE SUPPORT
by Peter Lazenby
THE NHS crisis is so severe that the cash intended for investment to improve the service is instead being used meet the cost of the current problems.
An damning National Audit Offi ce (NAO) report published today fi nds
that £1.8 billion intended to help the NHS prepare for “signifi cantly less funding” from 2017-18 onwards and “give it stability to improve perform-ance and transform services, to achieve a sustainable health system” was being used instead to keep serv-ices ticking over.
It also found that £2.7bn of extra money was not genuine funding but
loans from the Department of Health, which is charging the NHS interest, causing even more fi nancial problems.
In a further indictment, the spend-ing watchdog revealed that the involvement of private fi rms in the NHS wasn’t working, stating that use of the private sector “results in additional costs compared with pub-
licly fi nanced procurement.”Campaign group Keep Our NHS
Public said the report’s contents confi rmed the government’s real intention “to undermine the NHS through deliberate underfunding and privatisation.”
But the NAO report said: “The NHS is struggling to manage increased activity and demand
within its budget and has not met NHS access targets.
“Furthermore, measures it took to rebalance its fi nances have restricted money available for longer-term transformation, which is essential for the NHS to meet demand, drive effi ciencies and improve the service.”
Turn to page 5
Desperate health service forced to use investment cash for future to pay to keep things ticking over now
Violence of Israel
Troops shoot ‘wrong man’ in West Bank town of Jenin: P7
NEWS HOME Morning Star2 Friday January 19 2018
In loving memory of
IVAN BEAVISa good friend and comrade. He will be greatly missed.
Condolences to Christiane and family.
Fond regards,
Ray and Janet Walker and family
IVAN BEAVISIn memory of a good comrade and a
wonderful human being. Condolences to Christiane and the
family.
Nick Wright and Rosie Eagleson
TRANSPORT
East Coast protests against rail subsidy junkie Virginby Peter Lazenby
PROTESTS took place at rail-way stations across Britain yesterday against the govern-ment’s “big Branson bailout” of rail privateer Virgin-Stage-coach after it abandoned its East Coast franchise.
The franchise will end three years early, leaving the tax-payer to pick up an estimated £2 billion bill.
Protests organised by the We Own It campaign and supported by rail union RMT took place at Kings Cross in London, Bris-tol Temple Meads, Manchester Piccadilly, Edinburgh Waverly,
Milton Keynes and Redhill sta-tions yesterday morning.
The union branded the gov-ernment’s intervention the “big Branson bailout” in a swipe at Virgin founder and notorious tax-dodger Sir Richard Branson.
RMT general secretary Mick Cash joined the Kings Cross protesters.
SOUTHERN RAIL
No evidence to support Grayling rant against RMTby Conrad Landin
TRADE UNIONISTS blasted Chris Grayling for talking “nonsense” yesterday, after an independent analysis said his attempts to blame them for disruption on Southern Rail was baseless.
The Transport Secretary has repeatedly claimed that the “prime cause” of disruption on Southern is “the action of trade unions.”
As well as offi cial strikes, Mr Grayling blamed “unoffi cial action” including high levels of staff sickness among Southern rail staff.
But an analysis of his claims by Channel 4 News concluded there was “no sta-tistical evidence that unions caused the majority of disrup-tion overall.”
The broadcaster said Mr Grayling was also “unable to provide any fi gures to prove it one way or the other” when it contacted him about his claim.
In fact, the National Audit Offi ce found that only 38 per cent of 146,000 cancelled or signifi cantly late trains were caused by “train crew” inci-dents.
This includes strikes and shortages of guards and driv-ers — often caused by sick-ness, or by workers declining to take on overtime.
A spokesman for rail union RMT said: “It’s nonsense.
“In over 20 months there have been 39 strike days — less that two a month on aver-age. The performance on non-
strike days has been equally dire.
“The pretence that it’s all down to staff is rubbish.”
Southern and its parent company Govia Thameslink Railway have been plagued with problems since the fran-chise was awarded in 2014.
The company has admitted it doesn’t recruit enough staff. Bosses have repeatedly apolo-
gised to passengers for disruption which has made the company Britain’s worst performing railway.
Mr Grayling jus-tifi ed his claims on the basis that a government-com-missioned report from former rail
executive Chris Gibb had also blamed unions.
Mr Gibb claimed without evidence that unionised rail workers were “the primary cause for the system integrity to fail” and suggested personal sickness levels amounted to wildcat union action.
Referencing Mr Gibb’s boasts of running a “non-union” catering fi rm and “win-ning” against strikes when a Virgin rail boss, Channel 4 concluded that Mr Gibb’s assertion was “personal judgement.”
The RMT spokesman added: “If we were tak-ing unoffi cial industrial action through sickies, as suggested, the company would have sued us whole-sale.
“They never did, because it was a lie.”
TRANSPORT
MORE strikes are set to hit the Docklands Light Railway after a “break-down” in relations between workers and bosses.
Cleaners, security staff and travel safe offi cers employed by contractor ISS said yesterday there had been “no constructive progress” since their strike on New Year’s Eve.
Rail union RMT said bosses had failed to hold meaningful pay talks, or provide a proper response to the union’s pay claim.
They will now walk out for 48 hours from 5.30am on February 1.
This will be followed by industrial action short of strike.
RMT general secretary Mick Cash said: “We are supporting our members’ further strike action in a bid to force management to properly adhere to the agreed negotiating machineries and stop trying to impose funda-mental changes to working conditions.
“RMT reps have continually chased management to resolve the dispute but the company are blatantly ignoring the union’s concerns.”
DLR staff set to take strike action aimd talks crisis
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MIGRANTS’ RIGHTS
Labour hits out at Tories’ Calais lockdown spendingDIANE ABBOTT condemned Tory plans to address the refugee crisis in Calais by building more walls as “an admission of failure” yester-day.
Offi cials have announced a whopping £44.5 million will be spent on fencing, CCTV and detection technology in Calais and other ports along the Channel.
Part of the money will also be used to prevent another migrant camp from forming as it did in Calais in 2015.
The shadow home secretary said: “We have repeatedly been told that security meas-ures would solve the problem, but it has just shifted it from
Calais to Sangatte and back to Calais again.
“We need humane treatment of all these people, safe and legal routes for genuine refu-gees and the British govern-ment needs to honour our moral obligations by taking our fair share of refugees.”
Only around 750 children have been transferred to Brit-ain since the Jungle refugee camp in Calais was demolished by French police in 2016.
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SOLIDARITY: the Kings Cross protest
HOME NEWSMorning Star 3Friday January 19 2018
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“The £2bn East Coast bail-out is just another scandal embroiling this rotten govern-ment and adds to the growing charge sheet of waste and incompetence,” he said.
“There is no way the taxpayer should be picking up the tab for this latest East Coast scandal. The line should be taken back into public ownership.”
The East Coast Main Line runs from London to Edin-burgh.
Virgin-Stagecoach, which won the franchise when it was reprivatised in 2015, is the third privateer to hit the buff-
ers while operating the service.Previous operators GNER
and National Express also dumped the franchise early after failing to make profi ts.
The only operator to make a success of the service was publicly owned Directly Oper-ated Railways (DOR), which ran the service from 2009 to 2015, after National Express’s failure.
DOR returned a profi t of more than £1bn to the Treas-ury while operating the serv-ice — then the Tory govern-ment privatised it again.
WORK
Casual contracts causing widespread instabilityCASUAL workers are fi ve times more likely to drop out of work than those on permanent con-tracts, according to a new TUC report published today.
People who had been in casual employment for a year or more were at much greater risk of becoming jobless than permanent staff, researchers at Sheffi eld and Greenwich universities found.
TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady (pictured) said: “People are often told that casual contracts are a stepping stone to fi nding bet-ter work.
“But for many this isn’t the case. Instead of improving their career prospects, lots of
casual workers fi nd them-selves dropping out of work altogether.”
Separate TUC polling has found that two-thirds of zero-hours workers would prefer to have guaranteed hours.
More than half say they have diffi culty managing liv-ing expenses because they can’t get enough hours.
PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS
PFI more expensive with few benefi tsby Felicity Collioer
LABOUR ramped up its calls to end the scandal of private fi nance initiatives (PFI) yes-terday following a damning report by Whitehall’s spending watchdog.
The National Audit Offi ce (NAO) found little evidence that government investment in more than 700 existing public-private projects has delivered fi nancial benefi ts.
And it found the cost of new privately fi nanced projects such as building schools “can be 40 per cent higher” than using public money.
The auditors also disclosed that taxpayers will be forced to hand over nearly £200 bil-lion to contractors for at least 25 years on projects with a capital value of just £60bn.
Although the fi ndings were made before the collapse of privateer Carillion, they included the revelation that The Tories have a £2.6 million equity stake in one of its major projects — public money that is now at risk.
Following Caril-lion’s fall, unions have reported cases of workers and apprentices being laid off across the country with numer-ous construction projects halted, and no certainty over when work would restart.
Shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Peter Dowd said the NAO’s report “only further demonstrates this Tory gov-ernment’s continued commit-ment to fl eecing taxpayers for
the benefi t of large PFI fi rms.“It also raises more ques-
tions over the use of PFI in a week in which the Carillion scandal has left many fearing for their jobs and standard of their public services,” he said.
“The next Labour govern-ment will draw a line under the failed PFI approach to public investment, and will replace it with a transparent and a c c o u n t a b l e approach, which will reduce the costs and deliver signifi cant savings to the tax-
payer.”Unison general secretary
Dave Prentis said: “PFI hasn’t made schools or hospitals run any more effi ciently, and the deals that may have seemed to some like a good idea at the
time will also have ended up costing signifi cantly more.
“Many local communities might have seen shiny new schools and hospitals con-structed, but the spiralling costs have cost taxpayers a fortune. Millions of pounds of public money has been wasted that could have been spent improving public services.”
Following union calls, the government has set up a national taskforce on Carillion, which met yesterday, with the TUC calling for protections for pay and pensions, and a mora-torium on future outsourcing.
Labour leader Jeremy Cor-byn said he wants to see changes to procurement rules to make the public sector the default choice for running gov-ernment services.
Public-private mashup costs 40% more on average, says NAO
BROMLEY
Outsourced staff ballot on library strikeby Peter Lazenby
“OUTSOURCING cheer-leader” Bromley Council is facing strike action from con-tracted-out workers who say they have been demoralised by lack of staff, pay and time off.
A strike ballot is being held by the Unite union at two sites as a national row over “outsourc-ing” of public services to private companies continues following the collapse of construction and services giant Carillion.
Among the Tory-controlled council’s contractors are Greenwich Leisure Ltd (GLL), which took over the jobs of 36 workers at 14 libraries, and Certitude Support, which employs 20 council care work-ers at Astley day centre.
Unite regional offi cer Onay Kasab said the two companies have “woefully failed to live up to the public service ideal, hence the two strike ballots.”
“The GLL ballot is about staffi ng, pay and time off for union duties,” he said.
“Staff are at breaking point, with workers being shipped in from neighbouring boroughs to help cover the gaps.
“This is the only thing that has stopped Bromley’s librar-ies from closing because of inadequate staffi ng.
“Certitude has refused to recognise the union or to dis-cuss pay.
“In addition, staff have per-sistently raised maintenance issues with serious health and safety implications.
“These companies are two
stark examples which strongly reinforce the case that the public sector is best placed to deliver public services — and such services should be taken back in-house, not just in Lon-don, but across the country.”
Bromley is described by Unite as “a major cheerleader for the privatisation of public services” with ongoing plans to cut its workforce from 4,000 to 300.
The ballots begin on Thurs-day and Friday next week.
PFI POSTERCHILD: Carillion
NEWS HOME Morning Star4 Friday January 19 2018
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PROPERTY
Ministers back move to protect music venuesby Felicity Collier
MUSIC fans celebrated yester-day after the government caved in to pressure and backed changes to planning rules which will help protect grassroots venues.
Housing Secretary Sajid Javid said that developers building new homes near music venues will now have to take responsibility for addressing noise issues.
Labour MP John Spellar launched a private member’s Bill which was supported by the Musicians’ Union and passed its first reading in the Commons earlier this month.
Musicians including Paul McCartney, Billy Bragg, Chrissie Hynde, Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason and The Kinks’ Ray Davies all supported the Bill.
Musicians’ Union national organiser for live perform-ance Dave Webster said it was “welcome news and we
are pleased that the govern-ment has listened to the music industry.
“The pledge to strengthen the National Planning Policy Framework will give Musi-cians’ Union members places to play and audiences to sup-port them, and give venues the protection they so desperately need.”
Shadow culture secretary Tom Watson said: “We must now all make sure that the commitments made today are carried forward as promised by ministers, so that new building developments take the needs of existing music venues into account.”
Over the past decade, more than a third of music venues across the country have closed.
Several venues in Bristol, including the Thekla, Fiddlers and The Fleece still face threats, and there has been a recent campaign to save Car-diff’s “music street,” Wom-anby Street.
CHILDCARE POLICY
Parents paying for nursery meals as funding troubles hit fl agship scheme by Felicity Collier
PARENTS are being forced to pay for their children’s meals, nappies and trips while at nurs-ery due to government under-funding of its fl agship child-care scheme, an educational charity warned yesterday.
Last September, the govern-ment pledged to provide 30 hours of free childcare — dou-ble the amount previously on offer — to parents that met the earnings threshold.
But a study by charity the Pre-School Learning Alliance has found that only a third of childcare providers giving out the 30-hour scheme are deliver-ing the offer free to all parents.
And 40 per cent said that they have introduced, or increased, charges for addi-tional goods and services as a result of the scheme.
The survey, which ques-tioned 1,662 nurseries, pre-schools and childminders, fol-
lows warnings from childcare providers that the current lev-els of funding are too low, meaning they have had to get parents to foot the bill.
Alliance chief executive Neil Leitch said: “Respondents have laid out in black and white that the 30-hours policy is simply not working, with a continued lack of adequate funding leaving many with no option but to pass the funding shortfall on to parents.
“This has left parents to pay the price for government under-funding through often unex-pected charges for things like
nappies, food and trips, while the government continues to claim that it’s delivering on its promise of ‘free’ childcare.”
Chief executive of National Day Nurseries Association Purnima Tanuku said the gov-ernment needs to be honest with providers and parents.
She said: “In asking for charges for meals and other extras, nurseries fi nd them-selves in a very diffi cult posi-tion. They need to make these charges to remain sustainable but the DfE guidelines state that these payments must be voluntary. Nurseries should not be put in this position.”
Shadow minister for early years Tracy Brabin said: “The government’s underfunding of such an important policy has left providers with no choice but to shift costs onto parents and the funding shortfall is already causing damage with providers leaving the sector at an alarming rate.”
GOTCHA: It was a case of it’s that time, Mr Wolf after 12-year-old Torak was safely recaptured yesterday following several hours of freedom from a sanctuary in Beenham, Berkshire. The UK Wolf Conservation Trust fi rst realised he was missing at around 7.45am yesterday after a night of heavy winds may have possibly forced open his gate. However the sanctuary’s founder Teresa Palmer said the gate was probably opened deliberately. ‘A lot of people don’t particularly believe in having animals in captivity,’ she said.
HOME NEWSMorning Star 5Friday January 19 2018
KEVIN HALPINRemembering our Kev one year on.
Sorely missed, but never forgotten.
In love, friendship and comradeship
Anita
WESTMINSTER
Thatcher statue gets thumbs downby Peter Lazenby
PLANS to erect a statue of reviled ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher in Lon-don’s Parliament Square look set to be shelved over concerns of vandalism.
The proposal for the statue came from the charity the Public Memorials Appeal Trust, whose patron is the Duke of Wellington, but West-minster Council has been
advised against the idea.An original plan for a memo-
rial was blocked in July over fears it would be attacked.
In 2002 a protester decap-itated a £150,000 Italian mar-ble statue of Thatcher on display at London’s Guildhall Library.
Prime Minister Theresa May has said that fear of van-dalism should not influence a decision over the statue.
But the proposal breaches a longstanding agreement that
no statues should be erected until a decade after the sub-ject’s death to “allow partisan passions to cool and enable sober reflection.” Thatcher died in 2013.
The planning document also states that the depiction of the hated former Tory leader in state robes does not “reflect her role as prime minister,” and that, with another statue of her in the adjacent Houses of Parliament, there is no rea-son to overturn the council’s
policy against new monuments in the area.
The document also says that Parliament Square and the surrounding area is a “monu-ment saturation zone” and that the backers of the statute have produced no evidence of sup-port for the proposal from the Thatcher family.
Westminster Council’s planning committee will con-sider the document on Tues-day.
FRONT PAGE
NHS FADES ON
LIFE SUPPORT
AS CASH
CRISIS
DEEPENS FROM P1: The NAO said addi-tional grants of £2.4bn were in fact loans to NHS trusts, “which have worsened rather than improved their financial performance.”
Keep Our NHS Public co-chairman Tony O’Sullivan said: “We know that the gov-ernment is directing NHS funds into private contracts and extorting interest pay-ments from trusts which are already underfunded.
“Private companies benefit-ing from government policy are also the ones donating to the Conservative Party.
“The problem for campaign-ers is confronting the absolute lies of the government, here exposed by the NAO.”
Shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: “The NAO’s report confirms the government’s flawed and wholly inadequate approach to the sustainable, long-term funding of the NHS.
“Ministers have failed to increase per-head spending in real terms each year, a key election promise, and there are still no details of a long overdue pay rise for NHS staff.
“Our NHS is in crisis. Years of underinvestment culmi-nated in December 2017 being the worst month on record for A&E performance and elec-tive operations being can-celled until the end of Janu-ary.
“Targets are being missed and in-year cash injections are not improving the financial performances of trusts.
“Unlike the Tories, Labour outlined a costed long-term plan for funding the NHS. Labour will give our NHS an extra £6bn a year to ensure that our NHS remains a world-class serv-ice for all.”
Labour leader Jeremy Cor-byn said: “The NHS is stretched beyond belief because of its lack of resources. The Prime Minister told Parliament: ‘We are better prepared than ever for the winter crisis.’
“Two weeks later … we see the reality of it, which is patients being treated in hos-pital car parks and ambu-lances.”
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COURTS
Women’s rights campaigners will have to wait months for ruling on convictionsWOMEN’S RIGHTS campaign-ers were left frustrated yester-day after being told they must wait months for a court ruling on their challenge to a law requiring former prostitutes to disclose past soliciting convic-tions.
The judge said that they needed more time to mull the case over before coming to a decision.
Nia, which supports women who are victims of violence, said on Twitter: “So now we — and more importantly, the women claimants — must wait. Again.
Getting this far has taken years.”
The case against the current law was brought by a group of women who were all trafficked within Britain while under the age of 18 and forced into prosti-tution.
They argue that it is unlawful for past soliciting convictions to be stored and disclosed to poten-tial employers.
One woman said she still had to explain her criminal record 20 years after escaping prostitu-tion, while another claimed she was treated “like a sex offender.”
Nordic Model Now, which campaigns for the abolition of prostitution, said: “The convic-tions present a significant bar-rier to exiting prostitution but the shame and stigma should fall on these men instead.”
The group pointed out that convictions for pimping and sex trafficking are “shockingly low.”
It supports the Nordic Model approach to prostitution, which imposes tough penalties on pimps and traffickers, and makes buying sex a criminal offence, in a bid to reduce the demand for sex trafficking.
MAKING A STAND: The campaigners at the court in London
NEWS WORLD Morning Star6 Friday January 19 2018
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EUROPE
Four dead as high winds sweep across continentby Our Foreign Desk
HIGH winds battered Europe yesterday, killing at least four people in three countries, grounding fl ights, halting trains, ripping roofs off buildings and fl ipping over lorries.
Falling trees killed two 62-year-old men in the Nether-lands, a woman south of the Bel-gian capital of Brussels and a 59-year-old man at a camping site in the German town of Emmerich, near the Dutch border.
Police spokeswoman Jose Albers told Dutch national
broadcaster NOS that author-ities were also investigating whether the powerful gusts were to blame for the death of a 66-year-old man who fell through a perspex roof in the central town of Vuren.
The national weather service recorded wind
speeds of up to 87 mph in the southern port of Hook in Hol-land as the storm passed over.
A m s t e r d a m ’s Schiphol briefl y
halted fl ights for an hour in the morning.
Flag carrier KLM had already scrapped more than 200 fl ights before the storm. And trains were halted across the nation.
Social media in the Nether-
SUDAN
Communists urge release of protesters by Our Foreign Desk
COMMUNISTS across the Mid-dle East have united in a call demanding the Sudanese author-ities several political prisoners who were arrested earlier this week following protests against austerity measures.
Sudanese Communist Party leader Muhammad Mukhtar al-Khatieb was detained in a 3am raid on his home on Wednesday along with other leading communists.
Leftwingers from across the region have expressed solidar-ity with the jailed activists.
Kuwait Progressive Move-ment secretary-general Ahmed al-Dayen said his party stood “in solidarity with the struggle of the Sudanese people for free-dom and a decent life, and sal-vation from the rule of tyranny and corruption.”
Mr Dayen urged the Suda-nese authorities to release Mr Khatieb and his comrades.
The Iraqi Communist Party declared its “full solidarity
with the legitimate struggle of the Sudanese communists and people for ending the tyranny, and for freedom, dignity and social justice.”
It called on “the communist parties, democratic forces and all the supporters of freedom and progress in the world, to raise their voices in defence of Mukhtar al-Khatieb and his comrades.”
Jordanian Communist Party secretary-general Faraj Atmiza expressed “great resentment and anger” at the arrests.
He noted the similarity with economic decisions taken by the Jordanian government, and called on Sudan to end its repressive measures and free its political prisoners.
The arrests occurred fol-lowing a protest organised by the Sudanese Communist Party against President Omar al-Bashir’s decision to cut wheat subsidies and devalue the Sudanese pound, causing the price of bread and other essential to soar.
JORDAN
Activists call for release of two jailed journalists PRESS freedom advocates are calling for the release of two Jordanian journalists who were arrested after they accused the country’s fi nance minister of tax evasion.
Shadi al-Zinati and Omar al-Mahrama, of the Jfranews website, were nabbed by police on Tuesday after Finance Minister Omar Mal-has claimed the allegations against him were false.
They face charges under Jordan’s press and cybercrime laws, which contain sections that make it easy for authori-ties to arrest journalists.
The Middle East Eye reported that dozens of media workers rallied outside the Jordan Press Association (JPA) on Wednesday, holding a banner bearing a quote from King Abdullah promising that journalists would not be pros-ecuted for doing their jobs.
JPA freedoms committee chair Khaled Qudah said the body was working to free the pair.
He told the Alghad newspa-per that “these arrests strike at the heart of freedom of expression in Jordan.”
POLAND
Anti-smog tariff ‘does not go far enough’ENVIRONMENTAL cam-paigners in Poland said yester-day that a new “anti-smog” energy tariff was not enough to tackle the country’s awful air pollution.
Poland generates almost all of its electricity by burning coal and, over the winter, people often use coal or oil-fuelled heat-
ers in their homes to keep warm.The energy market regulator
said it hoped people would instead adopt the new tariff, which is slightly cheaper than the two most popular plans, and switch to electricity heaters.
While not ideal — as such heaters will almost certainly be powered by coal-fi red
power plants — offi cials hope that it will reduce the amount of smog.
Campaign group Polish Smog Alarm said that the energy ministry had so far failed to restrict the sulphur content of coal, which would make a difference by eliminat-ing the worst-quality coal.
NORTHERN IRELAND
Staff defi ant in Bombardier trade war BOMBARDIER workers in Northern Ireland will “fl ex their muscles” to save their jobs if a trade ruling goes against the aircraft manufacturer, a union leader warned yesterday.
“As workers we won’t be col-lateral damage in a trade war,” stormed Unite regional offi cer Susan Fitzgerald.
The US plans to impose duties of 292 per cent on imports of Bombardier’s C Series jets, fol-lowing a complaint by US air-craft and arms giant Boeing.
Boeing alleged Bombardier had used subsidies to sell its jets below-cost in the US.
About 24,000 jobs are at risk if the tariffs are imposed.
“There is no harm that we give a glimpse of the ferocity here of Bombardier workers united and mobilised in a common cause,” Ms Fitzgerald told a rally at the company’s East Belfast plant.
“There is no harm that eve-ryone sees what it is like when a workforce with this size and power fl exes their muscles.”
TOPPLED: Two trucks lie on their sides on a busy motorway in Erfurt, central Germany, after being pummeled by huge gales
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS: Bombardier workers rally outside the fi rm’s base in east Belfast
WORLD NEWSMorning Star7Friday January 19 2018
PALESTINE
Israeli police ‘shoot wrong man’ in raidby Our Foreign Desk
ISRAELI occupation forces killed a Palestinian labourer yesterday after allegedly mis-taking him for his cousin in a pre-dawn raid in the West Bank town of Jenin.
Israeli police claimed that the man was a Palestinian resistance fi ghter who had last week shot and killed an extremist rabbi from an illegal Israeli settlement.
One man was killed and sev-eral other Palestinians were arrested during the raid on Jenin refugee camp, Israeli secret police Shine Bet said.
However Palestinian health offi cials disputed reports from Israeli media which initially identifi ed the man as a Hamas fi ghter called Ahmen Jarrar, claiming Israeli forces had in fact killed his cousin, a 30-year-old man with the same fi rst and second name but dif-ferent middle names.
The Jarrar family described the 30-year-old as a labourer who was not involved in poli-tics.
Khitam Jarrar, the mother of the local Hamas fi ghter, told reporters that she saw a dead body in the front garden of her home as she walked out and asked the troops who it was, but wasn’t given an answer.
Ms Jarrar said her son had left the family home about 30 to 40 minutes before the start of the raid and that she still didn’t know if he was alive or not.
She added that soldiers fi red rockets at the house and then demolished it with bulldozers. Two other homes belonging to Ahmed’s uncles were also
demolished and a third was damaged, as a collective pun-ishment.
The raid was part of a hunt for members of an alleged Hamas cell that Israeli forces claimed were responsible for the drive-by shooting of Rabbi Raziel Shevach in the West Bank last Wednesday.
Palestinian killed after he was ‘mistaken’ for cousin in Hamas
INDIA
PM resumes £360m arms deal with IsraelBENJAMIN NETANYAHU has said that a £360 million anti-tank missile deal that India shelved with Israel is back on the table.
After the Israeli leader (pictured) held talks with Indian PM Narendra Modi, the Indian government said it would
resume the deal with arms-maker Rafael. India was said to have pulled out in favour of backing the state-owned Defence Research and Development Organisation to develop the
missiles.Mr Netanyahu said that “there will be many more deals.”
Israel is India’s
third-largest supplier of weapons after the US and Russia. Last year, Israel’s state-owned IAI announced over £1.5 billion in air and missile contracts with India.
India has also bought more than 150 Israeli-made drones, and an Israeli fi rm will supply weapons for India’s fi rst aircraft carrier, which is under construction.
IN BRIEF
Kiev passes huge sell-off Bill UKRAINE: The Kiev parliament passed a Bill yesterday that will help push through a fi re-sale of 3,000 publicly owned companies.
The International Monetary Fund has withheld billions of pounds in loans from Kiev, saying it wasn’t cutting quickly enough.
Parliament also passed a law on the country’s east, where troops are fi ghting anti-fascist forces. The law shows Kiev offi cials have no intention of “ending the fratricidal war,” the Communist Party said.
Anger as trade union forced to close RUSSIA: Global union IndustriAll has condemned the ruling of a St Peters-burg court that ordered one of its affi liated trade unions to close down.
The court ruled on January 10 that the Interregional Trade Union Workers’ Association should close because of its political activities — including a statement criticising government policy.
IndustriAll said that the judge’s ruling “set a very dangerous precedent.”
Albanian language law vetoed by IvanovMACEDONIA: President Gjorge Ivanov vetoed a new law making Albanian the country’s second offi cial language on Wednesday night.
A quarter of the country’s 2.1 million people are ethnic Albani-ans, but the language dispute has been fractious. Protesters stormed parliament in April and attacked MPs who had elected an ethnic Albanian as speaker.
The main opposition party also boycotted the vote on the language Bill.
Cape Town limits water use furtherSOUTH AFRICA: Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille said yesterday that residents must use no more than 50 litres of water a day from February 1, down from 87 litres now.
The city’s dwindling water reserves mean offi cials are planning to shut off taps on April 21, when residents will have to collect water from 200 points around the town.
Experts have linked the water shortage to climate change and population growth.
lands was fl ooded with images of people being blown over, cargo containers falling off a ship and damage to buildings, including the roof peeling off an apartment block in the port city of Rotterdam.
Offi cials closed an infl atable storm barrier east of Amster-dam to prevent fl ooding as the storm pushed up water levels. Authorities also temporarily halted all trams and closed the city’s zoo.
Before halting all trains, the Dutch rail service reported numerous incidents, including a collision between a train and a trampoline. In Amsterdam, a man had a narrow escape when a tree was blown over onto his scooter. He escaped unhurt.
In neighbouring Belgium, the port of Ghent closed down because of the high winds and tram traffi c was halted in parts of Brussels.
German police reported several injuries. Across west-ern Germany, air and train traffi c came partially to a halt, some 100,000 people were left without electricity and schools remained closed.
In Romania, snowstorms and high winds forced the clo-sure of dozens of schools, sev-eral main roads and ports, and tens thousands of people were left without electricity.
ZIMBABWE
Elections to be held in 4 to 5 months by Our Foreign Desk
ZIMBABWEAN President Emmerson Mnangagwa said yesterday that elections will be held in May or June follow-ing the fall of Robert Mugabe last year.
Mr Mnangagwa had prom-ised to hold a vote following his appointment as interim president by the ruling ZANU-PF party in November, replac-ing long-term ruler Mr Mugabe. The state-run Herald newspaper quoted Mr Mnan-gagwa yesterday as saying:
“Zimbabwe is going for elec-tions in four to fi ve months’ time” while on a visit to neigh-bouring Mozambique.
That would be ahead of the timeframe stipulated in the constitution, which says elec-tions should be between July 23 and August 21.
Mr Mnangagwa and main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai are likely con-testants in the race for pres-ident.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the ZANU-PF leader said he would wel-come election observers from
the United Nations, European Union and the Commonwealth.
The EU and the United States, which still has sanc-tions against Mr Mnangagwa for his past activities as a top Mugabe aide, are Zimbabwe’s biggest donors.
Mr Mnangagwa travels to Davos, Switzerland, next week for the World Economic Forum gathering of world leaders and big business chiefs, the fi rst time a Zimbabwean president will attend the meeting.
He told bosses at a Zimba-bwe Business Club function yesterday that the country was
“open for business.”Mr Mnangagwa said he was
going to Davos to “dispel the perception” that Zimbabwe is “an isolated island.”
Zimbabwe’s economy is currently in a poor state, owing to its following of Inter-national Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank pre-scriptions some years ago, as well as rampant corruption.
IMF offi cials have already called on Mr Mnangagwa to make deep cuts to govern-ment spending and pay off old debts.
COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT: Palestinians search the rumble of a house bulldozed by Israeli forces in the West Bank town of Jenin
FEATURES Morning Star
StarComment
8 Friday January 19 2018
PFI is perhaps the most Tory policy of allTHE sheer scale of the ongoing costs of private finance initiative (PFI) contracts should shock but not surprise.
The National Audit Office (NAO) calculates that, even with no more dodgy PFI deals struck, the public is on the hook for £200 billion of payouts — over £10bn this year and with payments stretching off into the 2040s.
And for what? For contracts with a capital value of £60bn!
From start (under John Major in the 1990s) to finish (whenever Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour gets the keys to No 10), PFI and all its related concoctions have been and continue to be a swindle of the most extreme pro-portions.
PFI is perhaps the perfect Tory policy: pay the private sector to build something, and then pay the private sector for the privilege of paying the private sector to build something.
It is the privatisation of not only the construction and servicing of what should be fully public services, but the privatisation of their funding too.
HIHAnd at every link in the chain — and well after you
run out of chain, it seems — privateers get to pad their pockets from the public purse.
PFI was taken up with gusto under New Labour, a bid to repair basic infrastructure that the Tories had let rot for nearly 20 years — such as crumbling schools and hospitals — while keeping the books clear of any big costs (supposedly), buttering up big business bosses, and forcing “flexibility” and insecurity on public-sector workers.
Of course, you always end up paying — and PFI contracts have the public sector paying for terms of 25 to 30 years, long after it would have paid off any bonds issued to build whatever it was that needed building.
Fifteen years ago, amid Blair and Brown’s PFI boom, the European Services Strategy Unit estimated that the average extra cost of PFI contracts was 72 per cent of the original budget.
And more recently, in 2010, the NAO’s report into PFI in housing found that nearly all of the contracts surveyed had seen costs exceed the original plan — and more than half of those had seen costs double. The cost of one PFI housing project was more than three times that originally forecast.
HIHBut so what? For the neoliberals, that’s a benefit
too. You pay the private sector for letting you pay the private sector, and when the eye-watering payments become too much for whichever poor NHS trust or council or whoever is burdened with them, you get to blame supposed public-sector inefficiency and sell off the whole lot (again).
Luckily, the government can rely on the fabled ef-ficiency of the private sector — firms such as, er, Car-illion.
Carillion which got fat on PFI contracts, whose bloated size — everything from construction, where it notoriously blacklisted workers, to school dinners — and the enormous consequences of its collapse could never have happened without the mass priva-tisation of government investment and services.
Of course, private-sector efficiency is a myth — one that has been busted time and time again, and is eas-ily pierced when one thinks about the benefits of co-ordination and co-operation over wasteful and destructive competition.
It’s long past time we buried this shambling zom-bie and took our essential services back into public control, and ensure those who work for and all of us who depend on them never have to suffer the depri-vations and indignities that are the market’s bread and butter.
ONE of the Tories’ new big money donors keeps breaking advertis-ing regulations.
The latest Electoral Commis-sion figures, released at the end of last year, show that in Sep-
tember 2017 a firm called Hotham Services gave the Tories £25,000. Hotham Services is owned and controlled by Yorkshire multimil-lionaire Malcolm Healey.
Healey also gave the Tories £100,000 in April 2017 to help Theresa May fight the election.
He gave that money in his own name. But Healey is reportedly not keen on being in the press, so he may have switched to giving through a company because his previous dona-tions made in his own name attracted some press coverage.
71-year-old Healey built up the Hygena kitchen brand in the 1970s and ’80s. He sold it in 1987 for £200 million. Healey now owns and runs another company, West Retail Group, which has an impressive £500m annual turno-ver.
West Retail Group has two arms. One, Wren Kitchens, sells fitted kitchens. The other, Ebuyer, is an online computer sales company.
Unlike some big Tory donors, Healey is a
major employer. His firms give a lot of people jobs. He isn’t just some financier whizzing money offshore.
But both his companies seem to have prob-lems when it comes to “misleading” advertis-ing.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled against Wren Kitchens six times since 2013.
The watchdog says Wren exaggerated how much bigger and how much better value it was compared to other kitchen shops.
In 2016 Wren was fined £12,000 by Trading Standards for charging higher than advertised prices in their shops.
Wren has also been criticised for poor stand-ards. The BBC Watchdog programme investi-gated Wren for poor standards in 2015, with customers left for a long time with half-finished kitchens.
It appeared again in BBC’s Rip Off Britain in October 2017, where Angela Rippon and co reported its delays and mistakes.
The ASA also had trouble with his other business, Ebuyer, which sells computers and computer stuff through its website.
In 2014 The Register, a technology news website, reported Ebuyer’s long running prob-
lems with the ASA under the cheeky headline: “Toothless watchdog growls, firm says ‘LA LA LA, WE’RE NOT LISTENING’.”
The ASA told Ebuyer that its advertisement offering “free next-day delivery on all of your orders this month” was misleading because it did not actually apply to all orders.
Lots of orders, including any that cost less than £49.99, were excluded, as were other orders depending on location and weight.
The ASA was especially bothered that Ebuyer didn’t reply to its complaint. It said: “The ASA was concerned by Ebuyer’s lack of response and apparent disregard for the [Advertising] Code,”
In September 2012 the ASA told Ebuyer off no less than twice for misleading customers over hard drive promos, and over “free deliv-ery” claims.
In July that year it had also been scolded
WHEN Trump was elected, some argued he would be a semi-fascist president. I wrote in the Morning Star that he would be more like a
US Berlusconi — a sleazy rightwinger who would play with and use the far right, but not be easily used by them.
It looks like (thankfully) I was right. Steve Bannon was Trump’s link to the “alt-right” — the newly rebranded US fascist and far-right fringe.
Trump was happy to play to their racist themes to get elected. But Bannon’s attempt to build Republican links to the alt-right look much less successful.
He’s been sacked by Trump because the president is ultimately interested in pushing through typical right-wing Republican poli-cies — like huge tax cuts for the rich — than
Bannon’s plans for a right-wing “anti-Estab-lishment revolt against the permanent polit-ical class at home, and the global elites.”
And now Bannon has been sacked by Breit-bart, the alt-right-friendly website he ran. The big investors behind Breitbart are keener to be friendly with Trump than with Bannon.
It turns out Bannon didn’t have an inde-pendent movement, he had a job with a web-site. But he and the alt-right are still a danger.
The US far right has been rejuvenated, as they showed in the Charlottesville demonstra-tions. But the US left has mobilised heroically and is keeping them in check.
However, Bannon himself, who was trying to get Republicans to embrace the alt-right, thankfully didn’t have an independent move-ment. So he didn’t have any chance of enforc-
ing his rotten will on a nasty president. He just didn’t have enough people to move
on the streets or develop policies in the gov-ernment, or an independent way to call them to action. That’s a good thing.
What it shows is that when you judge a political force, you have to consider its organisation. Not just how well-crafted the messages are, or whether they seem to have a hotline into people’s psyches or an ability to get on the telly. These things are all impor-tant. But you must also judge a political organisation by its ability (or lack of ability) to run a movement, to organise, recruit and mobilise.
Thankfully it seems these were Bannon’s weaknesses. Let’s make sure it stays that way.
n Follow Solomon Hughes @SolHughesWriter.
Steve Bannon banished
Busted by the advertising regulatorsSOLOMON HUGHES reveals how a big Tory donor’s two companies keep falling foul of the ads watchdog
POLITICS
FEATURESMorning Star 9Friday January 19 2018
for “misleading” tablet promotions. Ebuyer was also told off by the ASA in 2011 for a wifi internet radio promo spot that the regulator said “misled” consumers.
I’ve double-checked and this long history of Ebuyer ignoring advertising regulations is accurate.
So there is a bit of a pattern here. Both the companies run by one of the Tories’ big money backers have broken a lot of advertising regu-lation.
In their manifesto, May’s Tories promised to “strengthen the hand of regulators” and “strengthen the powers of consumer enforce-ment bodies” and “put the interest of vulner-able consumers first.”
But with the owner of rule-breaking busi-nesses funding May, won’t her promises of “better regulation” turn into just more dereg-ulation?
A SNEAK government announcement just before Christmas revealed that private companies received £8.52 million of government funding as part of changes to social workers’ employment.
The controversial new accreditation process has already been criticised by social workers and local government bosses as too costly, unnec-essary and undermining professionalism.
The accreditation test for social workers has been mired in controversy since it was first announced at a time of local government cut-backs.
The government has faced a backlash over private-sector involvement in the test’s develop-ment after it was announced private consultancies KPMG and Morning Lane Associates would design the assessment process. Some 60 per cent of social workers surveyed by the British Asso-ciation of Social Workers are against the new system.
In addition to undermining social workers, the government’s slashing of local authority social work budgets over the past five years has eroded their capacity to run residential care.
It’s a classic case of running down a public service to the point of failure and then justifying privatisation as a solution.
Councils receiving poor Ofsted inspection reports would have troubleshooters parachuted in, ostensibly to help turn services around. But the hidden agenda is to soften them up for even-tual privatisation.
New regulations have allowed companies such as G4S, Serco and Virgin Care to legally bid for work within children’s social services once they create a not-for-profit subsidiary company.
The original private-sector company would be able to charge the subsidiary for costs, therefore garnering profit from children’s services.
With cuts in funding, local authorities are struggling to fulfil their statutory duties to ensure child protection and other children’s social serv-ices. The fear is that cuts may force them to go with cheaper alternatives, such as external bid-ding companies.
There is also added concern that private-sec-tor companies would use their not-for-profit sub-sidiaries to place children in care that was ben-eficial to them financially, rather than what was best for the child’s development.
For example, private equity firms own two of the three largest foster placement providers and 65 per cent of residential homes for children are now run by the private sector (only 11 per cent are run by charities).
Laing Buisson, the research analysts of private health and social services, recently provided an insight into this market.
Their most recent report on the children’s social care sector offers plenty of encouragement for investors.
In recent years outsourcing to private chil-dren’s homes rose 8 per cent to 67 per cent, “encouraged by capital shortages,” and this “momentum still has some way to run.”
Privatising children’s care will herald a return to the Poor Law, with state institutions and prac-tices overwhelmed by the most intractable, com-plex and labour-intensive work, leaving quick-fix, easy-to-solve problems to profiteers.
The long-term consequences for social policy will be disastrous, cheating a generation of chil-dren of good-quality state provision and leading to deprived areas becoming even more socially excluded.
Councils in Doncaster, Richmond and Kingston are experimenting with creating private compa-nies to run social care while Staffordshire and Bristol have allowed groups of social workers to set themselves up as independent practices sep-arate from local authority control.
The College of Social Work was abolished two years ago, removing a further obstacle to priva-tisation.
When it was set up in 2010, after the contro-versy sparked by the death of 17-month-old Peter Connelly, the outgoing Labour government said social work needed an authoritative voice.
Like the royal colleges in the health sector, the College of Social Work was intended to help give the profession the standing it deserves and the status it needs to influence national policy-making and public debate.
The news about social work accreditation fol-lows shocking revelations in December that
Richard Branson’s Virgin Care won a record £1 billion of NHS contracts last year, as £3.1bn of health services were privatised despite a govern-ment pledge to reduce the proportion of care provided by private companies. Many of these contracts are for vulnerable children’s services.
Overall, private firms scooped 267 — almost 70 per cent — of the 386 clinical contracts that were put out to tender in England during 2016-17.
They included the seven highest-value con-tracts, worth £2.43bn between them, and 13 of the 20 most lucrative tenders.
Virgin’s £1bn haul means it now has over 400 separate NHS contracts. The £3.1bn in contracts, a big rise on the previous year’s £2.4bn, prompted concern that profit-driven companies are increas-ingly involved in delivering care, in a develop-ment that undermines repeated assurances by the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt that they play only a marginal role.
“These figures clearly show that privatisation has a strong momentum within the NHS,” said Paul Evans, the director of the NHS Support Federation, a campaign group which monitors the privatisation of NHS services and which pro-duced the report.
“The doors to private-sector involvement in the NHS remain open despite promises to move away from market-based approaches by NHS leaders and politicians. Privateers continue to win huge new NHS contracts.”
Virgin Care’s role has prompted particular anger among anti-privatisation groups. It pays no tax in Britain and its ultimate parent company, Virgin Group Holdings Ltd, is based in the Brit-ish Virgin Islands tax haven.
In addition, it came under fire for suing six clinical commissioning groups in Surrey, NHS England and Surrey County Council last year after losing an £82 million contract for children’s services to a rival bid involving a local NHS trust and two social enterprises.
A settlement of the action appears to have involved the six CCGs paying Virgin an undis-closed sum.
The private sector’s £3.1bn of wins last year represented 43 per cent of the £7.2bn of contracts tendered by the NHS for services, including babies’ health and out-of-hours GP care.
That dwarfed the £2.55bn (35 per cent) of ten-ders won by NHS trusts and £1.53bn (21 per cent) by not-for-profit organisations, including chari-ties.
n Steven Walker is a Unicef Children’s champion and author of Safeguarding Children and Young People (Russell House Publishers).
The creeping entry of privateers into child welfare services
PUBLIC SERVICES
by Steven Walker
FEATURES Morning Star10 Friday January 19 2018
NOT a day passes without a prominent Israeli politician or intellec-tual making an outra-geous statement against Palestinians.
A prominent Israeli journalist, Ben Caspit, sought yet more punishment. He suggested that Ahed Tamimi and girls like her should be raped in jail.
“In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportu-nity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras,” he wrote in Hebrew.
Many of these statements tend to garner little attention or evoke rightly deserved outrage.
Just recently, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, Uri Ariel, called for more death and injuries on Palestin-ians in Gaza.
“What is this special weapon we have that we fire and see pillars of smoke and fire, but nobody gets hurt? It is time for there to be injuries and deaths as well,” he said.
Ariel’s calling for the killing of more Palestinians came on the heels of other repugnant statements con-cerning a 16-year-old girl, Ahed Tamimi.
Tamimi was arrested in a violent Israeli army raid at her home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh.
A video recording showed her slap-ping an Israeli soldier a day after the Israeli army shot her cousin in the head, placing him in a coma.
Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, known for his extremist political views, demanded that Tamimi and other Palestinian girls should “spend the rest of their days in prison.”
A prominent Israeli journalist, Ben Caspit, sought yet more punishment. He suggested that Tamimi and girls like her should be raped in jail.
“In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportu-nity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras,” he wrote in Hebrew.
This violent and revolting mindset, however, is not new. It is an extension of an old, entrenched belief system that is predicated on a long history of violence.
Undeniably, the views of Ariel, Bennett and Caspit are not angry statements uttered in a moment of rage; they are all reflections of real policies that have been carried out for over 70 years.
Indeed, killing, raping and impris-oning for life are features that have accompanied the state of Israel since the very beginning.
This violent legacy continues to define Israel to this day, through the use of what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe describes as “incremental genocide.”
Throughout this long legacy, little has changed except for names and titles. The zionist militias that orches-trated the genocide of the Palestin-
ians prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948 merged together to form the Israeli army and the leaders of these groups became Israel’s lead-ers.
Israel’s violent birth in 1947-48 was the culmination of the violent dis-course that preceded it for many years. It was the time when zionist teachings of prior years were put into practice and the outcome was simply horrifying.
“The tactic of isolating and attack-ing a certain village or town and executing its population in a horrible, indiscriminate massacre was a strat-egy employed, time and again, by zionist bands to compel the popula-tion of surrounding villages and towns to flee,” Palestinian historian Ahmad al-Haaj told me when I asked him to reflect on Israel’s past and present.
Al-Haaj is an expert on the Nakba, the catastrophe that befell Palestin-ians in 1948.
The 85-year-old intellectual’s pro-ficiency in the subject began 70 years ago, when, as a 15-year-old, he wit-nessed the massacre of Beit Daras
at the hands of the Haganah militia. The destruction of the southern
Palestinian village and the killing of dozens of its inhabitants resulted in the depopulation of many adjacent villages, including al-Sawafir, Al-Haaj’s home village.
“The notorious Deir Yassin mas-sacre was the first example of such wanton killing, a model that was duplicated in other parts of Pales-tine,” Al-Haaj said.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine at the time was orchestrated by sev-eral zionist militias. The mainstream Jewish militia was the Haganah, which belonged to the Jewish Agency. The latter functioned as a semi-gov-ernment, under the auspices of the British Mandate government, while the Haganah served as its army.
However, other breakaway groups also operated according to their own agenda. Two leading bands among them were the Irgun (national mili-tary organisation) and Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang). These groups carried out numerous terror-ist attacks, including bus bombings and targeted assassinations.
Russian-born Menachem Begin was the leader of the Irgun which, along with the Stern Gang and other Jewish militants, massacred hun-dreds of civilians in Deir Yassin.
“Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue this until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so every-where, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, thou has chosen us for conquest,” Begin wrote at the time. He described the massacre as a “splendid act of conquest.”
The intrinsic link between words and actions remain unchanged.
Once a wanted terrorist, nearly 30 years later Begin became prime min-ister of Israel. He accelerated land theft of the newly occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, launched a war on Lebanon, annexed occupied Jerusalem to Israel and carried out the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
Some of the other terrorists-turned-politicians and top army brass include Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Rafael Eitan and Yitzhak Shamir. Each one of these
leaders has a record dotted with vio-lence.
Shamir served as the prime min-ister of Israel from 1986 to 1992. In 1941, Shamir was imprisoned by the British for his role in the Stern Gang. Later, as prime minister, he ordered a violent crackdown against a mostly non-violent Palestinian uprising in 1987, purposely breaking the limbs of kids accused of throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers.
So, when government ministers like Ariel and Bennett call for wanton violence against Palestinians, they are simply carrying on with a bloody legacy that has defined every single Israeli leader in the past.
It is the violent mindset that con-tinues to control the Israeli govern-ment and its relationship with Pales-tinians, in fact, with all of its neigh-bours.
n Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chron-icle. His forthcoming book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.
MIDDLE EAST
The violence of Israel’s birth still dominates its leadersWhen Israeli ministers call for wanton destruction against the Palestinians, they’re simply carrying on a bloody legacy, writes RAMZY BAROUD
OCCUPIED: Israeli troops clash with Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin yesterday
Morning Star FILM 11Friday January 19 2018
ROUND-UP
Urgent message in The Post
The Post (12A)Directed by Steven SpielbergHHHHI
A MASSIVE cover-up of US govern-ment secrets. The president trying to discredit and gag the press. Women battling for equality.
The Trump administration, 2018? No, The Post is set in 1971, when President Nixon attempted to stop the publication of the controversial Pentagon Papers.
The top-secret 7,000-page report
outlined how successive US govern-ments over three decades and four presidents knew they could never win the Vietnam war. They lied to the US people and said the contrary.
At the heart of this riveting polit-ical newsroom drama, teaming up Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and direc-tor Steven Spielberg for the first time, is the unlikely partnership between The Washington Post’s Katherine Graham (Streep) — the first female publisher of a major US newspaper — and its relentlessly driven editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks)
as they play catch-up with The New York Times after they broke the story first.
With two knock-out performances by Streep and Hanks and a compel-ling screenplay, Spielberg delivers a slow-burning and totally enthral-ling old-school drama in the vein of Spotlight and All the President’s Men.
What is fascinating — and hugely frustrating — is witnessing how Gra-ham, despite her powerful position, is treated patronisingly and dismiss-ively by the company’s male board
of directors just because she is a woman.
One of the most compelling and satisfying scenes is her final show-down with them over whether or not to publish, as it could jeopardise the company’s plans to go public on the Stock Exchange.
And it could land them in court and possibly jail — the New York Times, after all, was served an injunction stopping it from printing any further stories on the Pentagon Papers.
This captivating and thought-
provoking drama also questions whether journalists and newspaper publishers can be close friends with leading politicians and still be able to do their job impartially.
It’s a film that makes a trenchant case for the preservation of journal-istic integrity and the maintenance of a free press to keep the govern-ment in check — a message that certainly resonates today.
Interestingly, the White House has reportedly requested a copy of the film.
Oh to be a fly on that particular screening-room wall.
MARIA DUARTE recommends a resonant film on how the US government attempted to gag the press during the Vietnam war
The Final Year (12A)Directed by Greg BarkerHHHII
WHEN he and his team received unprecedented access to President Obama and his foreign policy team during their final year in office, director Greg Barker presumably believed he was making an unprec-edented tribute to the near-sanctified president and the ongoing Democrat grip on power.
Unfortunately, when Donald Trump defeated the tainted Hillary Clinton in the presidential race, real life got in the way.
Barker’s intention was to make a film that goes beyond the politics of the moment and “foster a wider dis-cussion about how America can and should relate to the wider world” and, to this end, he filmed at the White House and State Department
in Washington, the UN in New York and numerous countries globally as he followed US officials going about their business.
The director’s focus on secretary of state John Kerry, along with UN ambassador Samantha Power – fre-quently reducing Obama to per-fectly-played “guest star” status – makes for a riveting, if frequently over-facile and preconceived, dis-sertation on US power and politics, with the participants depicted here as being as much in thrall to public relations as to the ups and downs of real life.
The Final Year perfectly demon-strates PR at its most accomplished, proving Mark Twain’s dictum that “it’s easier to fool people than to con-vince them that they have been fooled.”
ALAN FRANK
Coco (PG)Directed by Lee Unkrich and Adrian MolinaHHHHH
AFTER the less than impressive Cars 3, Disney Pixar prove once again why they are the kings of animation with Coco. Celebrating Mexican culture, the importance of family and life and death, it’s their most magical and touching film to date.
The Golden Globe winner centres on 12-year-old Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez), an aspiring musician, who wants to follow in the steps of his idol Ernesto de la Cruz (a charming but narcissistic Benjamin Bratt), the greatest singer Mexico has ever known.
But there is one tiny problem — music has been banned in his family of shoemakers ever since his great-great grandfather, a guitarist, left his wife and baby to pursue a musical career.
By a twist of fate, on the Day of the Dead — when Mexicans remem-ber their loved ones who have passed away and their spirits can visit them — Miguel manages to cross into the Land of the Dead and seeks out Cruz, against his dead relatives’ wishes. He’s helped out by Hector (Gael Gar-cia Bernal) who agrees to accompany him if Miguel assists him in getting to the Land of the Living.
Coco is a glorious visual feast with its wonderfully vibrant and colourful characters and exquisite and detailed animation. The Land of the Dead, where it is permanently night time, is a combination of stunning artwork punctuated by a poignant musical score which also features a number of original songs alongside traditional folk songs.
The film also pays homage to some of Mexico’s most famous artists and musicians such as Frida Kahlo (Nata-lia Cordova-Buckley), Jorge Negrete and Cantinflas and there are plenty of nods to Pixar films past.
This dark and complex multi-lay-ered tale is another Pixar masterclass in storytelling which will make you laugh while moving you to tears as it reflects on the importance of fam-ily and the need to be remembered.
MARIA DUARTE
Attraction (12A)Directed by Fyodor BondarchukHHHHI
SCIENCE-FICTION films blasted off in 1902 with George Melies’s Le Voy-age dans la Lune and, ever since, extra-terrestrials have retaliated
with cinematic alien invasions of Earth.
In 1951, as the threat of nuclear war loomed, Michael Rennie as the alien Klaatu arrived with a message of peace in Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and, in this updated take on that film, Fyodor Bondarchuk, working from a screen-play by Andrey Zolotaryov and Oleg Malovichko, has a mysterious giant space object crash-landing in Mos-cow after being shot down by the Russian air force.
In the rising fear, street fights and other disturbances sparked by the alien arrival, the narrative follows a humanoid visitor from outer space who seeks to make peaceful emo-tional contact with young Earth girl Yulia (Irina Starshenbaum), while her father Colonel Valentin Lebedev (Oleg Menshikov) tries to prevent an all-out military attack on the aliens
and their spacecraft.Contemporary Moscow settings
and effective special effects — nota-bly the bizarre extra-terrestrial spacecraft and its rubbery, multi-limbed passengers — make their impact in a film which, though no Solaris, fascinates nonetheless.
AF
The Commuter (15)Directed by Jaume Collet-SerraHHHHI
IF YOU believe that not finding a seat is about the worst thing that can hap-pen while commuting, this riveting thriller might change your mind for-ever.
In it, insurance company manager Liam Neeson’s day begins badly when he is fired and it worsens when, on the train home from New York, sneaky fellow passenger Joanna (Vera Farmiga) makes him a cash offer he should have refused.
Frantic for cash, ex-cop Neeson agrees to find a passenger who shouldn’t be on board only to learn that he and his fellow travellers face death on the doomed express.
Jaume Collet-Serra directs the tension-infused narrative at a crack-ing pace, making good use of the confined railroad settings to rack up suspense, culminating in an all-too-credible train crash.
The train comes off the rails but the narrative doesn’t as armed police surround the wreck and Neeson fights to save everyone on board and expose the murderous goings-on.
It’s a film that grabs you from the off and holds you enthralled through-out.
AF
FEATURES Morning Star12 Friday January 19 2018
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by Bethany Rielly
BEFORE the US presiden-tial election, travel writer Tharik Hussain crossed the pond to interview people from the country’s Muslim communities. Most people he spoke to dismissed a Trump win as impossible but dreaded the thought of Clinton in the White House too in light of her role in wars on the Middle East.
A year after the orange bigot was sworn in, Hussain returned to talk to the same communities and see how they’re faring amid some of the worst anti-Muslim feeling in the country’s history. Their nightmare scenario came true on November 9 but what eff ect did it have on their communities?
In Heart and Soul: Muslims in President Trump’s America (BBC World Service 1.30pm) Hussain also goes in search for Muslim Republicans who actively supported Trump’s bid for the White House and asks them: “Why? Good god why?”
With the passing of the Muslim ban and anti-Muslim hate crime at its high-est level since the September 11 2001 attacks, Hussain asks the communities how they are coping in Trump’s US and what their hopes are for the future.
If you need cheering up after that, tune in to BBC2 to be transported across the Islamic world with Monte Don in his search for Paradise Gardens (9pm). In Islam, gardens have a symbolic signifi cance as mini earthly recreations of what to expect in the real paradise after death.
He starts off in Spain at the Alhambra to learn the basic building blocks of a paradise garden — four sections divided by water — before moving on to breathtaking Islamic gardens in Morocco, Iran, India and Turkey.
It’s a beautiful journey that off ers some much needed escapism on these cold wintery nights.
TODAY’S WEATHER
Saturday mainly dry, bright and cold with the odd shower. Overnight and into Sunday turning wet and windy, with snow in parts of the north. Milder and unsettled on Monday.
NEXT FEW DAYS…
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TRIBUTES to our fondly remem-bered fundraiser, former circula-tion manager and all-round joker Ivan are unsurprisingly continuing to pour in, with yes-terday’s total hitting a whopping £1,050 — of which almost all was donated in Ivan’s memory.
Of course such a generous tribute coincided with his fu-neral yesterday, which no doubt many of you attended.
In no particular order, let us start off by saying thank you to a true comrade in Liverpool who appreciated Ivan’s support for the excellent Pedal4Progress
intiative. We appreciated your £50 very much — a tenner for each of Liverpool’s European Cups. Ivan would’ve loved that.
Thanks to a London comrade who gave a score in memory of the big IB. Another London read-er donates £25 in memory of a “friend, mentor and comrade. RIP.” And thank you very much to the London reader who do-nated £100 in tribute to our fun-draiser extraordinaire. Another £25 comes in from Norfolk, while a comrade who has many mem-ories of working with Ivan in Nalgo sends in £50.
Those heroes up in Newcas-tle Upon Tyne held a collection in memory of Ivan (as well as proceeds from a NYE social) totalling £225, while another generous collection from the Southampton readers and sup-porters brought us £113. Thanks also to the comrade for £20 and the message: “Let’s get rid of the Tory scum forever.”
Thanks to Watford communists for their collection of £40 and £50 from “a fellow United fan.” We’re running out of room, comrades so I’ll just say thanks to team standing orders for £103.50!
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FEATURESMorning Star 13Friday January 19 2018
GEORGE W BUSH installed a bust of Win-ston Churchill in the Oval Offi ce at the White House. When Barack Obama came to power
he had the bust returned to Britain. Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hus-
sein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned in one of the concentration camps Churchill and his imperialists had invented.
Churchill was born in 1874 into a Britain that was painting huge areas of the world map bloody red.
Just three years later Victoria crowned herself Empress of India, and the rape and pillage that would mark Britain’s advance across Africa and much more of the globe moved up a gear.
At Harrow School and then Sand-hurst the young Winston learnt the simple message: the superior white man was conquering the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bringing them the benefi ts of Christian civili-sation.
Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta and later Archbishop Desmond Tutu would sum it up in a beautiful single paragraph.
“When the British missionaries arrived, we Africans had the land and the minerals and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
As soon as he could, Churchill charged off to take his part in these various barbarous and criminal adventures. He described them as “a lot of jolly little wars against barba-rous peoples.”
First came the Swat Valley, now part of Pakistan. Here he judged his enemy were merely “deranged jihad-ists” whose violence was explained by a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill.”
He gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroy-ing houses and burning crops.
Next he popped up in Sudan, where he boasted that he personally shot at least three “savages.”
The young Churchill played his part enthusiastically in all kinds of imperial atrocities. When concentra-tion camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they pro-duced “the minimum of suffering.” The Boer death toll was in fact almost 28,000.
At least 115,000 black Africans were swept into British camps, where 14,000 died. Churchill wrote of his “irritation that kaffi rs should be allowed to fi re on white men.” By now he was an MP and demanding a roll-ing programme of more imperialist conquests.
“The Aryan stock is bound to tri-umph,” was his battle cry.
As home secretary in 1911 he brought the artillery on to the streets of east London in a heavy-handed battle to fl ush out Latvian anarchists in the siege of Sydney Street. Welsh
miners have never forgotten his out-rages against the Tonypandy miners.
As colonial secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland’s Catholic civil-ians. The Irish have never forgotten this cruelty.
When the Iraqis rebelled against British rule, Churchill said: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”
Churchill, as we can see, was happy to be spokesman for brutal and brutish British imperialism. It seems Churchill was driven by a deep loath-ing of democracy for anyone other than God’s chosen race — the British.
This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then tram-pled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back.”
Churchill further announced: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly peo-ple with a beastly religion.”
In 1943, a famine broke out in Ben-gal and up to three million people starved to death. He bluntly refused any aid, raging that it was the Indians’ own fault for “breeding like rabbits.”
In Kenya Churchill believed that
the fertile highlands should be the exclusive preserve of the white set-tlers and approved the clearing out of the local “blackamoors.”
He saw the local Kikuyu as “brutish children.” When they rebelled under Churchill’s post-war premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps.
He approved various kinds of tor-ture, including electric shocks. whip-ping and shootings. Mau Mau suspects were burned and mutilated. Hussein Onyango Obama was just one who never truly recovered from the tor-ture he endured.
As colonial secretary Churchill
offered what he called the Holy Land to both the Jews and the Arabs — although he had racist contempt for both.
He jeered at the Palestinians as “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung,” while he was appalled that the Israelis “take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.”
After the war he was quick to invent the iron curtain as he started the cold war against his hated Bol-sheviks despite the fact that they had been his greatest ally in defeating Hitler and his nazis.
When he was re-elected prime min-ister in the 1951 election he rapidly restarted various imperialist adven-tures. There was the so-called Malayan Emergency, Kenya and of course the Korean war.
Churchill hated communism at home and abroad. He was always a supporter of British intervention in the young Soviet state, declaring that Bolshevism must be “strangled in its cradle.”
He convinced his divided and loosely organised Cabinet to inter-vene despite strong opposition from Labour.
In the 1926 General Strike Church-ill edited the government’s newspa-per, the British Gazette, and used it to put forward his anti-union, anti-Labour, anti-socialist rantings.
He even recommended that the food convoys from the docks should be guarded by tanks, armoured cars and hidden machine guns.
There are far too many other rea-sons why this champion of all things reactionary simply doesn’t deserve the paeans of praise being heaped on him at the moment.
I’m sure our letters page would welcome your own particular favour-ites, but let me fi nish with one that really makes me smile.
Even his reputation as an outstand-ing orator was, it seems, based on a lie. We now know that many of Churchill’s most famous radio speeches of the war were delivered by an actor, Norman Shelley.
Shelley went on to be a big star on BBC Children’s Radio and as Colonel Danby in the Archers.
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■ Yesterday’s answers
1. Whose political autobiography includes the chapters Planet Tatton and New Labour, New Sleaze? Martin Bell (An Accidental MP)
2. Which London Underground line served Stanmore from 1939 until 1979? The Bakerloo
3. What is the atomic number of lead? 82
1 About which bird of prey is the 1969 fi lm Kes?
2 In 1937, what was given to the leader of the opposi-tion for the fi rst time?
3 Which English county is bordered by Hampshire, Kent and Surrey?
The Quizmaster with William SitwellTest yourgeneral knowledge with our daily quiz – and see if you can beat The Quizmaster...
A recent fi lm and media reviews are busy singing the praises of Winston Churchill. But PETER FROST begs to diff er
HISTORY
The horrible truth about Churchill
MAN IN A WHITE SUIT: Martin BellPic: summonedbyfells/Creative Commons
LETTERS Morning Star14 Friday January 19 2018
HEALTH
NHS admin staff are feeling the pinch tooTIM MICKLEBURGH’S sup-
port for the NHS is undoubted (M Star January 16) but his reference to ‘‘overpaid admin staff’’ is unhelpful.
The long-lasting pay-freeze imposed by succes-sive Tory chancellors has hit the NHS’s vital admin workers as hard as anyone and played a large part in
the problems accumulating
in the service for patients and providers alike.
Now that even senior health service offi cials are starting to speak openly about the pre-carious state of the service it is time to multiply pressure on the government to fi nd funds.
It is in this context Day of Protest on February 3 is so important. The theme is ‘‘NHS in crisis: fi x it now’’ and its sup-
porters include trade unions, Health Campaigns Together, People’s Assembly and Keep Our NHS Public.
Actions will be taken at local, regional and national level.
The London event will assemble in Gower Street WC1 at noon before marching to Whitehall and Westminster.
FRANCIS PRIDEAUXLondon W9
Yesterday’sSudoku solution
■ The Daily Worker of January 19 1938 published a report “smug-
gled out of Italy” that 600 workers in an aircraft factory in Milan had been arrested for “sabotage to planes destined for Franco.”
There was “tremendous sympathy” for the Republican cause in Spain and “burning hatred for Mussolini’s adventure.”
Forty new aeroplanes were almost ready to be sent out to the rebellious fascist forces in Spain when it was discovered that all of them had been “damaged in such a way that they were practically useless.”
Despite “furious grilling by the members of the notorious Italian
secret police, the Ovra, no culprits had been discovered. Not one of the 600 workers “breathed a word which might have implicated any of his fellows.” Baffl ed, the secret police had to let the majority go free.
Meanwhile, desertions among the rebel troops in Spain defi nitely seemed on the increase, a report from Gibraltar revealed, with fascist leaders being “gravely alarmed by the great number.”
Unreliable troops had been sent as a punishment to the Pozoblanco front in Andalusia while a new military police force, modelled on Hitler’s Brownshirts was scrutinising all new recruits.
Just in the last two days 50 arrests
had been made in La Linea and armed police regularly patrolled the streets with machine guns.
Masses of leafl ets appealed to troops opposing the Republic: “Soldiers, do not forget that, above everything else, we are Spaniards … invaded by many foreign-ers who have nothing in common with us.”
You can read editions of the Daily Worker (1930-45) and Morning Star (200 0-today), online at
Ten days’ access costs just £5.99 and a year is £72
mstar.link/DWMSarchive
80 YEARS AGO TODAY...
GRAHAM STEVENSON explores the Star’s online archives
Italian workers sabotaged Mussolini’s aerial gifts to Franco
Politicians ignored signs of trouble at Carillion
CONSTRUCTION
In RealityUber BV v Aslam and ors
Legal notesYour weekly tribunal report
WHEN deciding whether drivers were workers in Uber BV v Aslam and ors, the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) held that, although the relationship between the parties was presented in the written documentation as being one of agency, the tribunal was right to focus on what happened in reality between them.
Basic factsUber provides a range of passenger transportation options (depending on the vehicle being hired) through a smart-phone app. After signing up online, prospective Uber driv-ers then had to personally attend a specifi ed location where they were interviewed and given an induction. Under a contract with Uber, the drivers were given access to the app which they could not transfer to anyone else.
According to the written documentation between the two parties, the drivers were self-employed, and the company acted as their agent by facilitating an agreement between the driver and the passenger. In reality, however, Uber exercised control over the drivers in a number of ways.
For instance, although drivers were theoretically free to accept or decline trips, they had to accept at least 80 per cent of requests. If they declined three in a row, they could be temporarily logged off the app. And although drivers could theoretically follow their own route, in real-ity they were expected to follow the route set out by the app’s mapping software. Drivers given bad ratings by pas-sengers could be sent feedback by Uber, with an ultimate penalty of “deactivation” from the app.
A number of Uber drivers in London brought tribunal claims arguing that as workers under section 230(3)(b) of the Employment Rights Act, they were entitled to be paid the minimum wage and to have their working time calcu-lated according to the Working Time Regulations (WTR).
Tribunal DecisionRejecting the notion that Uber in London was a “mosaic of 30,000 small businesses linked by a common ‘platform’ [as] faintly ridiculous,” the tribunal found that Uber needed a pool of drivers to be available as and when a demand for driving services arose, so that they could get drivers to passengers as quickly as possible.
It therefore concluded that any Uber driver who had the Uber app switched on, was within the territory in which they were authorised to work (in this case, London) and was able and willing to accept assignments, was working for Uber London Ltd under a “worker” contract. As they were workers they were therefore engaged on working time for the purposes of the WTR and entitled to be paid the national minimum wage.
Uber appealed, arguing that the tribunal had failed to take into account the written documentation which it said made clear that the drivers provided the transportation services and so were self-employed while Uber, in common with other private hire companies, was merely acting as an agent for the drivers.
EAT decisionIn line with the decision of the Supreme Court in Autoclenz Ltd v Belcher and ors, the EAT held that the tribunal was right to look behind the label of self-employed driver given to the drivers by Uber in its written documentation and consider the reality of the situation. In this case, the driv-ers were, in reality, incorporated into the Uber business of providing transportation services, although the relationship was presented in the written documentation as one of agency.
The tribunal had correctly concluded that Uber drivers were required to accept trips offered by Uber, London and could not cancel them once they had done so. In addition, once they had come on duty, not only did the drivers have to be in the relevant territory with the app switched on, but also had to be able and willing to accept a high percent-age of assignments. Although there were gaps between assignments, that was not fatal to their claims as workers.
The EAT therefore dismissed the appeal.
CommentThe case is another reminder to employers that they can-not write into the contract self-employed status if that does not refl ect the reality of the situation.
CARILLION’S collapse is tragic for the workers and families affected by the lat-est tragic mess both locally and nation-wide, while the senior executives and the fat cat bosses rake in huge bonuses at our expense.
They have left a trail of destruction with small and medium fi rms in every sector now fl oundering and put them and thousands of their workers on the brink of going under.
The banks who were bailed out are pretty quiet.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn rightly attacked government policies and called Carillion a “watershed moment.”
In a video released on social media, he said: “In the wake of the collapse of the contractor Carillion, it is time to put an end to the rip-off privatisation policies that have done serious damage to our public services and fl eeced the public of billions of pounds.”
Politicians ignored the warnings for months. Some of these were profi t warn-ings which are meant to act as a red fl ag. Was this Conservative government asleep on the job? Or simply stuffi ng the pockets of their friends while it was possible, legally possibly I might add, to do so.
Over the last 40 years successive gov-ernments have had a love-in with these huge oligarch fi rms and sucked up to them. Where the political mantra was “public is bad and private greed is good.”
Where much of our public sector has been hoovered up including local services, building contracts, railways, schools, public housing, prisons, school meals etc.
Governments and many local councils have ignored their own members and the public to refrain from the folly of out-sourcing and PFI con-tracts that are mas-sively hiked up and like paying off your mort-gage on the credit card.
Fleecing their work-force and taxpayers while those at the top get their pockets lined with tel-ephone-fi gure salaries, bonuses
for failure and other perks.We have seen the big rip
off by water and the utili-ties against the public.
Politicians were told for years to change and implement public policies — that fell on deaf ears.
It’s time more serv-ices were brought back
under public control and not just pick up the tab
when they go bust.GED DEMPSEY
Rotherham
Have your say – send a letter
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E3 2NS
MISMANAGED: The Carillion collapse is having wideranging eff ects
SPORTMorning Star 15Friday January 19 2018
Athletes put at risk after being forced to play in a heat wave
TENNIS: AUSTRALIAN OPEN
Temperatures of up to 40°C ‘a danger in terms of health’
MEN’S TABLE TENNIS
Scottish table tennis star forced to fund own trainingby Our Sports Desk
CRAIG HOWIESON is delighted he will be going to the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games — but said yesterday that he fears he will be left counting the cost of funding cuts.
The 27-year-old was named in the Team Scotland squad which will depart for Australia in early April.
Yet the Edinburgh player remains bitter about Sport Scotland’s decision to with-draw fi nancial backing for table tennis competitors in the wake of the Glasgow Games four years ago.
Howieson — who is prepar-ing for his third Common-wealth appearance — and teammates Gavin Rumgay and Colin Dalgleish are even hav-ing to fund their own trip to Dusseldorf for a training camp
in the build-up to going down under.
The Edinburgh PE teacher said the lack of sup-port had already put his medal bid on the back foot.
The Scottish No 2, who will compete in the sin-gles and team events and possibly the doubles alongside Rumgay, said:
“We’ve had £0 invested in us in terms of per-
formance since the games in Glasgow.
“For the last four years we’ve had to pay our own way to eve-rything or fi nd
sponsors to help out.“Commonwealth
Games Scotland are very supportive and will pay
for us to go to Australia but we’ll have to fi nd the money ourselves for the Germany trip.
“You’ll be hard pushed to fi nd any other Scottish athlete going to the Gold Coast who is paying for a training camp themselves.
“I could go on for hours about how frustrating that is. Between the age of 18 and 20 I made huge progress and had some really encouraging
results in the lead up to the Delhi Games.
“But when we came back they took the funding away from us.
“In 2012 we got funding again and by 2014 my results were improving again as we’d had 18 months of good train-ing.
“But three months after Glasgow they took our funding away again. It feels like we’re being treated with contempt.”
by Our Sports Desk
SOME weary players sat shirt-less on changeovers, ice-fi lled towels draped around their necks. Others retreated to any bit of shade they could fi nd on court and sought treatment for blistered feet and heat stress.
Temperatures soared to 40°C as the start of an expected heat wave hit the Australian Open yesterday, bringing misery to players unfortunate enough to have their matches scheduled dur-ing the day session and keep-ing many spectators away.
“I didn’t expect to play this kind of match,” a thoroughly
exhausted Juan Martin del Potro said after beating Karen Khachanov in a nearly four-hour, second-round match. “I prefer to watch on TV. Or stay on the beach, drinking some beer.”
Scorching temperatures are common at the Australian Open — so much so the tourna-ment has an extreme heat policy that allows for the ref-eree to close the roofs on the three main show courts and suspend play on the outer courts when temperatures surpass 40°C.
Matches weren’t halted yes-terday as the highs stayed just below 40° for much of the day, but that doesn’t mean the heat
didn’t cause problems for the players.
Gael Monfi ls, for one, stag-gered through a good portion of his second-round match against Novak Djokovic, bend-ing over repeatedly to catch his breath between points and at one stage returning to the comfort of his shaded chair without even attempting to return Djokovic’s serve.
Afterwards, he called the conditions “risky” for the play-ers, especially with the new rule restricting the time between points to 25 seconds.
“I get super dizzy. I think I have a small heatstroke for 40 minutes,” said Monfi ls, who is considered one of the fi ttest
players on tour. “At that time, the offi cials have to make a move. Maybe wait a little bit, whatever, fi ve minutes between the set. Maybe they have to [make a] small adjust-ment.”
Djokovic agreed, describing the conditions as “brutal” and some of the toughest he’s ever played in.
“There are certain days where you just have to, as a tournament supervisor, recog-nise that you might need to give players few extra hours until [the temperature] comes down,” he said. “I understand there is a factor of tickets. If you don’t play matches, people will be unhappy.”
But he said the conditions were at the point where it becomes a “danger in terms of health.”
There were no retirements due to the heat on day 4, how-ever, and some players were even unfazed by the condi-tions.
Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei saw the heat as a benefi t in her second-round upset of Wimble-don champion Garbine Mugu-ruza.
“I know the weather is going to be a little bit tough today,” she said.
“I was thinking: ‘Ah, I’m from Asia. I maybe can han-dle it better than other girls’.”
MEN’S CRICKET
ENGLAND all-rounder Ben Stokes is to appear in court on an affray charge — the same day he was supposed to be making his international comeback in a Twenty20 match in New Zealand.
Avon and Somerset Police said yesterday that Stokes is due at Bristol magistrates’ court on February 13 to face the charge, brought following an incident outside a nightclub in the city in September.
The 26-year-old, who missed the Ashes after being suspended from playing for England, is accused of affray along-side two other men.
The charge follows a fi ght in the Clifton Triangle area of Bristol during the early hours of September 25 — several hours after England had played a one-day interna-tional against the West Indies in the city.
Stokes had earlier said he was “extremely delighted” to be back in the frame for England selection after the England and Wales Cricket Board announcement on Wednesday.
The two other men who have been charged are Ryan Ali, 28, and Ryan Hale, 26.
While England were in Australia, losing the Ashes series 4-0, Stokes played a few games for Canterbury Kings during a month-long spell in New Zealand before returning home to England.
Stokes due in court same day as Lions return
OUR SPORTS EDITOR LETS RIP IN SIMMONDS SPEAKS EVERY WEDNESDAY
COOLING DOWN: Juan Martin del
Potro on a break
SportMorning Star16
Friday January 19 2018
Friday January 19 2018 9 770307 175251
0 3
MSTAR 2018-01-19 FRI 1.0Published by the People’s Press Printing Society Ltd, William Rust House, 52 Beachy Road, Bow, London E3 2NS. Telephone: (020) 8510-0815. Fax: (020) 8986-5694. Email: [email protected]. Registered with Companies House as Morning Star (in-corporating the Daily Worker) No N5559. Printed by trade union labour at Trinity Mirror.
MEN’S FOOTBALL
PARDEW: FOOTBALL IS ‘LOSING THE PLOT’West Brom boss concerned with money spent on transfersby Our Sports Desk
WEST BROM boss Alan Pardew slammed football yes-terday for “losing the plot” in regards to the money spent on transfers.
The Albion manager is con-cerned where the extra cash is going and that football is not benefi ting from the huge sums being spent.
Alexis Sanchez is close to moving to Manchester United for a reported weekly wage of £500,000, with United appar-ently ready to pay over £30 million and shell out £10m in agents’ fees.
Pardew drew comparisons with Theo Walcott’s move to Everton — who Albion face in the Premier League tomorrow — for around £20m and feels the money spent is a worry.
“It’s very diffi cult with the prices now to gauge what’s good value,” he said.
“We live in a hyper-infl ated world because of the TV money received by the football clubs. Therefore, transfers and wages are going way out of kilter with real life.
“I think we’re all losing the plot with the fi gures. It’s just becoming, ‘Oh OK,’ and not even reacting to things any more.
“If you are a fan of British or European football, you would have a concern about how much money is actually being paid outside of the game.
“Because if you pay £20m to Arsenal for Theo Walcott, that’s great.
“That’s going back into the game and Arsenal might spend that on a player at Northamp-ton or a player at Stevenage, which they are looking at right now.
“It is just the other money that is going out of the game and obviously Paul Pogba’s
transfer was an indication of the type of scale of money that is not being regenerated into the game. It is a concern for anybody who loves foot-ball.”
Albion are yet to receive any bids for Jonny Evans, who they value at around £30m, despite
fi elding tentative enquiries earlier in the window.
They do not want to sell on deadline day and leave them-selves short and Zamalek defender Ali Gabr is a loan option should they lose Evans, with Manchester City and Arsenal interested.
“From my point of view, there’s been no bid so there’s nothing to discuss,” Pardew added.
“We have scenarios that are going to time out if we don’t get a bid for Jonny that’s acceptable for Jonny and for us.”
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FOOTBALL
LEEDS reached their fund-raising target of £200,000 yesterday for young fan Toby Nye’s cancer treatment, the club announced.
Toby, fi ve, is suffering from neuroblastoma, a rare form of cancer which spreads rapidly across the body and Leeds launched their One Day for Toby campaign in October.
All the club’s players and staff donated a day’s salary and the fi nal £25,000 has been pledged by midfi elder Samuel Saiz.
“It is with great pride that Leeds United can announce that the funds for Toby Nye’s Neuroblas-toma treatment have been successfully raised,” the club said.
Leeds United managing director Angus Kinnear added: “We talk about family and togetherness a lot at our club, it’s a culture we have been determined to reinstate across everyone involved with Leeds and raising this money has truly been a team effort.”
Leeds raise funds for young fan’s treatment
MEN’S CRICKET
Yorkshire bosses propose radical league changeby Our Sports Desk
A PROPOSAL to split the County Championship into three confer-ences of six teams apiece was put forward to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) yes-terday by two high-ranking Yorkshire offi cials.
Mark Arthur and Martyn Moxon, respectively chief executive and director of cricket at Yorkshire, have sub-mitted plans that would bring an end to the current two-division structure with promo-tion and relegation, which has
been in place since 2000.Such a model has been crit-
icised recently for a lack of incentives for teams who are not challenging at either end of the table, but the scheme under Arthur and Moxon, which would see each county play 15 matches a season, aims to eliminate that in a radical shake-up.
Arthur believes the format could start in the summer of 2020 and sees no reason why it cannot co-exist with the city-based eight-team Twenty20 tournament that the ECB is due to launch in the same year.
He said: “Martyn Moxon and I put it forward to the ECB a couple of months ago. We put it forward purely from a per-sonal point of view, not from a Yorkshire point of view.
“We feel that it would keep everybody engaged in the game because there are cer-tain counties that feel threat-ened — wrongly, in my opin-ion — by the new T20 city competition. We believe in 18 fi rst-class counties, and this would keep everybody together.”
Under the proposals, the teams would be split as fairly
as possible — in the fi rst instance depending on where they fi nished the previous sea-son — and would play each other home and away.
After 10 games, the counties would be separated once more according to their position in the standings, playing each other only once, and the overall champion county would receive £1 million in prize money.
ROLLING IN CASH? Alexis Sanchez is reportedly set to be paid £500,000 a week if he moves to Manchester United
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