Jeremy Corbyn

By Kevin Lindsay (ASLEF), Michael Hogg (RMT), Gary Kelly (TSSA), and Pat Mcllvogue (Unite) - Project for Peace & Justice, November 10, 2021

By staff - Transport Salaried Staffs' Association, November 10, 2021

TSSA, ASLEF, RMT, and Unite unions today united with Jeremy Corbyn and the STUC at COP26 to call on the Scottish Government to invest in Scotland’s Railways in order to fight climate change.

The unions held an event in Websters Theatre to promote their report “A Vision for Scotland’s Railways” which calls for better investment in railway infrastructure and staffing in order to encourage passengers back onto the railway. The report argues that staffed stations are safer at night and more accessible for passengers with disabilities.

Jeremy Corbyn said, “The land taken up by railways compared to roads is utterly minimal… For environmental considerations railways are the right way forward and this document indicates all of that.”

TSSA Organiser Gary Kelly said, “It’s not just the climate which is code red, it’s the railway itself. We're in the middle of a climate catastrophe when rainfall puts the railway at risk and the government's answer is to cut Network Rail staff. We're facing a real Code Red here. The question is what are we going to do about it?

ASLEF Organiser Kevin Lindsey said, “We want to see our vision become the template…. It’s crucial that passengers have an input, whether that’s people representing women, people representing young people or people representing disabled passengers, or just general passengers we want all voices to be heard. It’s so crucial to have a railway for all of Scotland.”

RMT Organiser Mick Hadley said “If we are serious about addressing the concerns about Scotland by giving the most vulnerable people access to trains, we need to give them access to staff - we need station staff to ensure it's safe to use Scotland's trains”

The unions criticised privatisation for failing both ScotRail and the people of Scotland.

Unite the Union Organiser Pat McIlvogue said, “All Abellio are concerned about is the profit, not concerned about the service, not concerned about the people, not concerned about the country. We've got a chance for a change now.”

Chairing the event, STUC General Secretary Roz Foyer said, “The current rail model fails services users and employees. We have a real opportunity when Scottish Government takes over ScotRail in April… There's an absolute need for us to mobilise people to demand that it stays a public service”

The tragic events at Stonehaven show climate change is real - it's here we're living with the effects. We need change. The rail unions are committed to working together to make that change happen.

By Meredith Bergman, Jeremy Corbyn, Sean Sweeney, et. al. - Project for Peace & Justice, November 8, 2021

By Laura Pidcock - Red Pepper, July 6, 2021

Imagine the mixture of pride and elation at getting a letter from the Durham Miners’ Association, asking you to speak at the annual Durham Miners’ Gala – the ‘Big Meeting’ I have been coming to year after year. Imagine getting up onto the huge stage and looking out over a sea of people, outlining the vision for working people under a socialist prime minister.

The Durham Miners’ Gala is where socialists go to politically replenish the soul for the fight ahead. It is simply the most electrifying experience in the British labour movement, steeped in working-class culture, tradition and, of course, struggle. The speech I delivered in July 2019 was partly about our confident preparations for government, and the changes a brand-new Ministry of Labour (that I would be heading) would bring. But it was also a message to activists to persevere under sustained attack. Just five months later, I found myself shaking the hand of the Tory MP, who had just taken my North West Durham seat by 1,144 votes.

In some ways, The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain, by Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, is a story about that defeat, and many others Labour suffered in the 2019 election. But it is also about the long history, a serious piece of writing that assesses the political, cultural and social ramifications of deindustrialisation in South Wales and County Durham.

Both the 2016 European referendum and the 2019 Tory landslide are commonly analysed over too short a period of time to understand the real shifts in politics and community. Some constituencies elected their firstever Conservative MPs. These events seem like ‘shocks’. Beynon and Hudson’s book takes a longer view, which is both refreshing and necessary if we are to escape the stranglehold the right has on discourse and opinion.

It explains in loving, careful detail why working people’s relationship with Labour in former industrial communities – where ordinarily they would have had strong class identification with the party – had become complex and ultimately soured. South Wales and Durham are used as case studies to examine that dislocation, and what emerges is a rich, social history.

By Daniel Aldana Cohen, Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, and Thea Riofrancos - Common Wealth, 2019

Climate politics are today bursting to life like never before. For four decades, market fundamentalists in the United States and United Kingdom have blocked ambitious efforts to deal with the climate crisis. But now, the neoliberal hegemony is crumbling, while popular climate mobilisations grow stronger every month. There has never been a better moment to transform politics and attack the climate emergency.

When the climate crisis first emerged into public consciousness in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were consolidating a neoliberal doctrine that banished the most powerful tools to confront global heating— public investment and collective action.

Instead, neoliberals sought to free markets from democratically imposed constraints and the power of mass mobilisation. Thatcher insisted that there was no alternative to letting corporations run roughshod over people and planet alike in the name of profit. Soon, New Democrats and New Labour agreed. While the leaders of the third way spoke often of climate change, their actual policies let fossil capital keep drilling and burning. Afraid to intervene aggressively in markets, they did far too little to build a clean energy alternative.

Then the financial crisis of 2008 and the left revival that exploded in its wake laid bare the failures of the neoliberal project. An alternative political economic project is now emerging—and not a moment too soon. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it, keeping global warming below catastrophic levels will require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” In other words: public investment and collective action.

Fortunately, movements on both sides of the Atlantic have been building strength to mount this kind of alternative to market fundamentalism. On the heels of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Democratic primary campaign breathed new life into the American left and its electoral prospects. Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour Party, spurred by a vibrant grassroots mobilisation, gives those of us in the U.S. hope: if New Labour could give way to Corbynism, surely Clintonism can give way to the left wing of the Democratic party. In the U.K., drawing on tactics from the Sanders campaign, Momentum has developed a new model of mass mobilisation to transform a fossilised political party. It’s restoring the dream that formal politics can be a means for genuinely democratic political organising. In turn, U.S. leftists are learning from Momentum’s innovations.

The vision of the Green New Deal that has taken shape in the United States in the past few months is in many ways a culmination of the U.S. left’s revival. The Green New Deal’s modest ambition is to do all that this moment requires: decarbonise the economy as quickly as humanly possible by investing massively to electrify everything, while bringing prodigious amounts of renewable power online; all this would be done in a way that dismantles inequalities of race, class and gender. The Green New Deal would transform the energy and food systems and the broader political economy of which they are a part.

Read the report (PDF).

By Nadia Prupis - Common Dreams, December 8, 2015

"By taking to the streets, we will be clearly and unequivocally rejecting the Hollande government's draconian and opportunistic bans on marches, protests, and demonstrations."

Video: At a packed meeting in Paris, Naomi Klein, supported by UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, calls for mass civil disobedience to break the ban on demonstrations on December 12. Trade unionists and others discuss the real solutions to climate change: an end to fossil fuels, energy democracy, and a just transition to millions of cllimate jobs.

Additional Speakers: Sean Sweeney (Trade Unions for Energy Democracy), Lyda Forero (Transnational Institute–TNI, Columbia), Josua Mata (Philippino Workers Central–SENTRO, Philippines), Clara Paillard (Public & Commercial Services Union–PCS, United Kingdom) and Judy Gonzalez (New York State Nurses Association, USA)

In Paris on Monday, a panel of activists, including author Naomi Klein and UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, spoke to a packed crowd on the role of the global labor sector in the climate justice movement and called for mass civil disobedience to break French President François Hollande's ban on demonstrations during the COP21 summit.

Klein spoke candidly about the global climate agreement being hammered out by world leaders this month, stating, "The deal that will be unveiled in less than a week will not be enough to keep us safe. In fact, it will be extraordinarily dangerous."

Wealthy nations have set up inadequate climate targets that could allow average global temperatures to rise by 3 or 4 degrees Celsius, Klein said—far higher than the agreed-on threshold of 2°C, which scientists say would cause catastrophic extreme weather events. The deal is going to "steamroll over crucial scientific red lines... it is going to steamroll over equity red lines... it is going to steamroll over legal red lines."

"Which is why on December the 12th, at 12 o'clock—that's 12-12-12—many activists will be peacefully demonstrating against the violation of these red lines," Klein said, prompting a round of applause from the audience of roughly 800 trade unionists and other workers and activists.