The Tories and Lib Dems lost 741 seats and 13 councils, including major cities like Southampton, where a year long strike campaign by local authority workers has finally seen their wage-cutting Tory bosses defeated at the polls.

Like in France, Britain has turned to the left under the hammer-blows of recession and austerity, unemployment and cuts.

The Labour Party – still associated with trade unions – was the main winner. Some left of Labour candidates – in Bradford, Walsall and Preston for example – also won, but Labour remains for millions of workers the only available political way to hit back against the Coalition.

Coalition crimes

And it’s not hard to see why the Coalition is so hated. Their budget has been exposed as raising taxes on pensioners’ incomes, hot snacks, caravans and hairdressers, while abolishing the top earners’ 50p tax rate and slashing corporation tax by 2 per cent.

This is a government for the rich by the rich.

It is also increasingly seen as corrupt. David Cameron regularly wines and dines party donors at No. 10 at £250,000 a throw, and enjoys close personal ties with key players in Rupert Murdoch’s News International media empire.

Any pretence that money and informal gatherings do not buy favours is laughable. As Murdoch told the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is the expectation in these circles.

Underlying this suspicion and hatred for the Coalition is the never ending recession. The economy is shrinking again; in truth it never recovered.

Unemployment stands at 2.65 million with twice that number needing to work extra hours to survive. Claimants are made to work without pay on government workfare schemes. Sick and disabled workers are forced into menial jobs even if they are terminally ill, while specialised Remploy factories are closed.

For those in work, pay has been pegged back for years, while inflation keeps pushing essential items like food, housing and fuel up and up.

The truth is austerity is choking the economy. The banks are sitting on their money, while a “lost generation” is deprived of jobs, priced out of education and hounded by an increasingly racist police.

Don’t wait for Labour

After the local elections, Labour leader Ed Miliband said: “Labour is back, throughout the country, on your side.”

But what has he actually done to stop the cuts? Labour councils have been implementing the cuts and the newly elected ones will doubtless do the same – if we let them. Labour refuses to back any strikes and is relying on voters returning them to office in 2015.

But we cannot afford to wait that long. The time to stop this destruction is now. Let’s hit this vicious government while the Coalition is reeling.

On 10 May 400,000 health workers, lecturers and civil servants will strike in defence of pensions. Unison’s Dave Prentis has called for a national demo against austerity in the autumn – “the biggest in our labour movement’s history”. UK Uncut is mobilising for direct action and street parties on 26 May to highlight inequality and expose the 1% who rule over us.

We need to unite these forces – young activists and mass unions – by organising from below, and demanding serious strike action: not one day, here and there, but all out and stay out to win.

We need to put the pressure on Labour too to oppose the cuts in deeds, not just in words, on the streets as well as in the council chambers and parliament.

But most of all we need a new, anticapitalist party that can help win today’s struggles and link them to the fight for a better world, a socialist future.

In Greece well over half the electorate – 65 per cent of Greeks – voted for parties that rejected EU-IMF austerity. One of them, the left reformist Syriza, more than tripled its vote replacing PASOK as the second largest party in terms of the popular vote.

On a more modest scale, Labour performed better in local elections than commentators predicted, gaining 823 councillors, 38 per cent of the vote and taking control of 32 councils from Glasgow to Southampton.

Years of savage austerity have hit the workers of Greece, Spain, France, and Britain hard. Of course if, instead of awaiting elections, they had unleashed a wave of direct action which culminated in indefinite general strikes then they could have thrown out their tormentors before millions lost their jobs, houses and pensions.

But thanks to their own leaders bungling and cowardice resistance rarely exceeded one-day strikes and mass demonstrations Despite heroic exceptions, like French oil refinery workers and Greek hospital staff, union movements did not act “all together’ and go all out for victory.

This was not the fault of the workers themselves, but of their reformist leaders, who blocked the road to unity and limited the effectiveness of the actions.

Given workers do not have the option of accepting defeat – given there are further economic storms ahead for all the countries of Europe (see page 4) – they used the only political weapon they had at their disposal to give the slump politicians a battering and voted for those who at least promised some respite.

Breaking illusions in reformism

The great mass of working people view elections from a practical angle – not mainly from the point of view of the ideas a party represents but from what it can do, either in parliament or the local council. Thus even when mass reformist parties have a track record of betrayal and holding back the struggle, if they are the only weapons with which to drive out the right workers will use it.

Of course it is pure foolishness to sit back and say, “our people are now in charge. They will do the business for us; all we have to do is support them.”

But the small numbers of revolutionaries who long ago shed illusions in these parties should not adopt smug but passive attitude of “they will soon learn their mistake”. Sectarianism, especially today, is quite as useless as opportunism.

When millions of workers and young people have pushed the mass reformist parties into office – or at least given them a huge electoral boost – revolutionaries need to relate to these mass illusions in a positive way. They need to do so by urging action to force the leaders to fulfil there promises and indeed go on to adopt more far-reaching change.

While the union and party leaders, after an election, will try to demobilize the masses using the argument that “we should not embarrass a friendly government” (France) or “we must wait for Labour in 2015” (Britain), experience shows that only worthwhile reforms are a by-product of the most militant class struggle.

Through using these tactics of the united front – unity in action plus criticism of the delays and sell outs by the reformist leaders – forces like the NPA in France and the embryonic new Anticapitalist Initiative in Britain can grow and become alternative poles of attraction for workers and youth demanding an end to austerity.

Such parties and initiatives need to present their own action programme, a strategy outlining the road to a workers government that can put an end to capitalism altogether.

These are times full of revolutionary potential. The road to an effective revolutionary party is not a broad and direct highway. It will demand tactical turns, temporary compromises and alliances but always combined with timely and forthright criticism of reformist misleaders. There will be defeats and setbacks, that is the nature of the class struggle. But the past few weeks should fill us with confidence that we can make real advances in the coming period.

These two murders are part of a bigger picture of institutional racism in the police force. Nothing has changed in the 13 years since the Macpherson Inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder investigation, which denounced the Met as “institutional racist” and rejected the idea that there were just a few “bad apples” in the force – the police remain racist to the core.

The ingrained racism stems from the role that the police have within capitalist society. They are paid defenders of private property and capitalist exploitation in a system that spreads racist ideology in order to divide and rule the working class. Do police arrest an employer that has sacked her/his workforce? No, but they will readily use their truncheons against workers on the picket line.

Reported racist abuse by police is on the rise, as shown by the Independent Police Complaints Commission’s (IPCC) own statistics. There are currently 13 accusations of racism lodged against Met officers. Since 2005, there have been 2,720 complaints of racism against the Met; of those, 42 were substantiated and just two officers were sacked.

In addition, figures released from the Ministry of Justice show that for 2009-2010, 43,219 black people were searched by Met officers under Section 60, compared with 27,217 white people.

Black people have the right to fight every aspect of this daily harassment and to stop the state criminalising whole communities. They have the right to organise black self-defence against police and racist attacks.

Twenty years ago, Los Angeles was set alight a year after Rodney King was pulled from his car and savagely beaten by four Los Angeles police officers. At least 15 white officers watched or participated in the systematic clubbing – over 50 truncheon blows – and kicking of Rodney, a black man who had been stopped for speeding after a chase.

The acquittal of those four police officers – by a near all-white jury – in April 1992 sparked a weeklong uprising in LA; demonstrations, protest and risings spread to other cities. There was outrage at the injustice of the verdict, but it was fuelled by the fact that state racism and police repression are part of normal life for that community.

Britain saw a very similar reaction in the aftermath of Mark Duggan’s murder. After years of stop and search and harassment by the police, young people took to the streets in cities across Britain and struck back against their oppressors. Yet it is these youth that have had draconian sentences meted out to them while not a single officer has ever lost their job in relation to a shooting or a death in custody.

In recent news, the 31 officers present at Mark’s shooting have refused to be questioned by the IPPC, which says it does not have the power to “compel” their testimonies. This exposes the sham of this so-called “independent” inquiry. The IPPC and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) are not independent but an extension of the British state. The IPCC’s role is to defuse the anger in the community under the pretence that something is being done.

Yet something has to be done. Mark, Anthony, Jacob Michael, Christopher Alder and the hundreds of others that have died at the hands of the police deserve justice. We have to fight to get truly independent inquiries – i.e. independent of the state – into racist beatings, murders and deaths in custody.

The inquiry should be made up of elected representatives from working class and anti-racist organisations of the black community, the labour movement and anti-racist legal experts, not ex-police, lawyers, bankers and their friends.

The campaign was launched after Greater Manchester police shot dead Anthony Grainger on 3 March 2012. His death at the hands of the police has left hundreds heartbroken and thousands devastated. The police used a submachine gun to shoot Anthony as he sat in a stolen car. No weapons were found in the vehicle and no sign that he posed any threat to the police.

Even the IPCC had to admit this shooting was no accident and the officer responsible could face criminal charges for manslaughter or murder.

Anthony’s partner, Gail Hadfield-Grainger, set up a Facebook group where family and friends could post their memories and photos of him, but soon people from across the country began voicing their outrage. Many who also have had family members killed by the police are demanding answers and justice. It has become a catalyst for linking together campaigns and now the group is growing by 1,000 members per week.

#Justice4grainger is raising money for the campaign and for his children’s future by selling wristbands, hoodies, t-shirts and leggings online. In addition, there will be a fundraiser social on 12 May at the Pint Pot in Salford.

The campaign is building for demonstrations on 17 June – Father’s Day – in towns and cities across the country to raise awareness and show the nation’s outrage at trigger-happy police. The main #justice4grainger protest will be in Manchester, while other demos have been confirmed in Leeds, London (Brixton), Slough, Sheffield, and Birmingham. We have to hold the police to account for their actions, particularly the officer that shot Anthony.

Please join the campaign.

You can find us on twitter (#justice4grainger), and facebook (www.facebook.com/groups/anthony.grainger).

Contact us with any questions you may have or to be added onto the update list.

Phone 07803812955. If you have a Blackberry, you can also add our pin: 27534832.

Thursday 3 May proved to be a red-letter day for Labour. The local elections saw a mass turn to Labour, despite its lack of strategy to oppose austerity. This was clearly a protest vote against the Tory and Liberal Democrat Coalition, aimed at punishing them for swingeing cuts and the bad handling of the economy, as Britain slides back into recession.

Labour wrested control of 32 councils, bringing its total up to 75 across the country. The party picked up 823 new council seats, for a total of 2,158. It gained 20 seats in Birmingham and took control of the council, which had been run by a Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition for eight years.

In Dudley Labour picked up 13 seats from the Tories to give it overall control of the council. Importantly for Labour, it also held Glasgow against the Scottish National Party (SNP). In Wales, Labour’s results were the best since 1996, taking control of 10 out of 21 councils in the poll.

It proved to be a bruising day for the Tories and even more so for the Lib Dems. The Tories lost 405 seats and control of 12 councils. Only in London did the Tories buck the general trend, with the re-election of Boris Johnson as mayor.

The Lib Dems crashed out, losing one council and 336 councillors, leaving them with the lowest number of seats since their party was formed in 1988.

In the Pentland Hills ward in Edinburgh, the Lib Dem candidate won fewer votes than independent candidate Mike Ferrigan, who ran his campaign as “Professor Pongoo” in a full penguin suit.

As a result the Coalition is facing sharp criticism from inside its ranks, and the cracks are deepening. The Tory right has attacked David Cameron, calling for “more Conservatism and less Liberalism”. The Lib Dems have been told to “keep calm” by Nick Clegg, but are mindful of the collapse in its activist base. Last year the Lib Dems lost just over 44 per cent of the seats they contested, and 70 per cent of their seats in metropolitan councils.

The Coalition also suffered a setback, as nine out of 10 cities rejected a directly elected mayor, effectively voting against replacing the power of councils – already much reduced – with personal popularity contests. The largely right wing local and national press more easily manipulates these mayoral elections, as London shows. Despite a big push from Cameron, only Bristol voted in favour.

Another party that suffered a drubbing was the fascist British National Party (BNP). All the BNP candidates who stood in the elections lost, meaning that there is no BNP councillor in Burnley for the first time in 10 years. These results leave the BNP with just three councillors, down from a high of 57.

The Left

George Galloway’s Respect Party built on its success in the Bradford West by-election, gaining five seats on Bradford council. This included the Little Horton seat of Ian Greenwood, Bradford’s Labour council leader since 2010, lost after three recounts to Respect’s Alyas Karmani.

The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) did not fare as well, garnering only 1.2 per cent of the vote in the London Assembly. Although it picked up two councillors – Michael Lavalette in Preston and Peter Smith in Walsall – it lost its seat in Coventry, held by Dave Nellist since 1998.

The TUSC’s poor results are the result of a number of factors, including a campaign woefully short of activists except where the Socialist Party or the Socialist Workers Party had candidates.

Although it stood key union figures, the organisation is too amorphous – a political alliance without a clear programme or democratic structure. It is difficult to know how to join TUSC and become an active member. Critically, it has not developed as an organisation beyond the sum of its parts.

People are looking for a real alternative with defined policies – a political party – that has longevity and is vying for political power. Respect has a prominent leader, true, but more importantly it says it’s a party.

These election results prove that people across the country still turn to the Labour Party to give the Coalition government a bloody nose. In this respect, the death of the Labour Party in the eyes of the working class is an exaggeration. But does that mean that Labour has won back support in working class communities?

The need for a new alternative to Labour

Well, Ed Miliband seems to think so, off the back of a few bad weeks for the Coalition. In his victory speech he told voters that Labour is “back throughout the country on your side”.

What he doesn’t admit is that most people can see that there is only a difference of timescale between the Coalition’s answer to the crisis and his. The austerity cuts – over 80 per cent of which have not yet been implemented – are deeply unpopular with British workers, but Labour do not stand opposed to them.

That is why George Galloway thumped Labour with a 10,000 majority in the Bradford by-election: he spoke out against the Tories’ vicious cuts and the sell-off of the NHS.

During Question Time on the night of the election, one person argued that if Labour were arguing what the French presidential candidate François Hollande was arguing, its popularity would see a massive resurgence. Many people are looking across the Channel to the Socialist candidate and wondering why no one in the UK is brave enough to adopt policies disapproved of by the bankers and the rich.

Instead Labour is expelling its few members that voted against implementing council cuts, such as George Barratt in Barking and Dagenham and Kingsley Abrams in Lambeth.

To counter this, we need to do two things. First, we need to place demands on Labour councillors that have won seats from the Tories and Lib Dems and apply pressure on them. We should demand that they refuse to implement the cuts, defend the NHS and support workers on strike. We cannot let them off the hook – we must push them to breaking point.

At the same time, we need to develop an alternative to Labour. We need to forge a political party that will fight for working class policies. We should call on all trade unions, left electoral alliances like TUSC and the Scottish Socialist Party, political organisations, rank and file groups, and new initiatives such as UK Uncut, Occupy and the Anticapitalist Initiative, to come together and call a national convention to discuss founding a new mass party of the working class.

We need a party that does not limit its political activities to electioneering, but is on the streets and the picket lines, embedded in working class struggles and active in our communities, with the aim of transforming the whole of society.

Output has not recovered even half of what it lost in the great crash of 2008-09 and the economy has flatlined over the past year, and has started to contract again with a 0.2 per cent drop in GDP in the first three months of this year. The UK has now joined seven other European Union countries, including large economies like Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, in a double-dip recession.

It must now be clear even to the many apologists for capitalism, who lamely complain that some of the Office for National Statistic figures are “rogue”, that this is a historic crisis of the system itself.

The facts speak for themselves. The service sector, which accounts for three-quarters of the economy, is bumping along the bottom, with business and financial services actually dipping in and out of recession.

Manufacturing is no longer growing, as its export markets are likewise suffering from recession and the relatively strong pound is not making industry competitive.

Construction has suffered a sharp fall, down nearly 5 per cent. While millions languish on council and housing association waiting lists and thousands of builders are on the dole or on short contracts, the fall in new builds is criminal. But the market dictates – and with house prices falling, sales are slow.

Banking crisis

Underlying all this is the continuing banking crisis. Financial institutions continue to hoard money – even that which was effectively given to them by the government in various rounds of “quantitive easing”.

Business analysts Ernst & Young expect 1.9 per cent of corporate loans not to be paid back (because the companies will go bankrupt,for example) and new loans will contract this year by 6.8 per cent (on top of a 6.1 per cent drop last year). Lending to businesses will not recover before 2016 while “insolvencies rocket to levels not seen since the 1990s,” its widely read report says.

But it is the working class that continues to bear the brunt of a crisis they did not cause.

At 2.65 million, the jobless rate is historically high. On top of this many thousands of full-time jobs have been replaced by part-time posts and “self employment”, neither of which offer the income or security workers need.

Wages have risen on average by 1.1 per cent in the past year, compared with inflation running at 3.5 per cent – a 2.4 per cent drop in real incomes.

Yet the cuts keep coming. Right wing Tories are asking for more and more austerity but as TUC leader Brendan Barber told the BBC, “94 per cent of the cuts announced so far have yet to be implemented”.

We have to demand of Barber, the union leaders and the resurgent Labour Party that they take action to defend jobs, wages and services here in the now. And if they won’t fight, we must launch the battle without them We did not cause this crisis and it is not fair that we should pay for it. Enough is enough – time to unite and extend the resistance.

At the start of March, Eurozone bosses breathed a sigh of relief, as the crisis seemed to have been halted after a near-miss banking meltdown in late 2011. At the heart of the reprieve was the European Central Bank (ECB), pumping more than €1 trillion of cheap loans into the banking system and a second bailout agreed for Greece, after a deal cut with its private creditors – the biggest debt restructuring (or government default) in history with a €174 billion write-down. Then 25 EU countries signed an historic fiscal treaty on 2 March, legally binding them to budget limits to be policed by EU bureaucrats, with only Britain and the Czech Republic staying outside. All this good news saw stock markets in Europe and the US soar, with many stock indexes hitting their highest level since last July.

But this proved to be a false spring for the beleaguered Eurozone economies. March may have entered like a lamb but it exited like a lion – or in the language of the markets, entered like a sickly bull but exited like a bear.

Double-dip recession

Late March saw a steady stream of overwhelmingly negative economic indicators and bad news that worsened in April. Manufacturing data and jobs figures have nose-dived since the second half of 2011, leaving 10.9 per cent unemployment totalling 17.4 million across the Eurozone. Early May figures showed an even steeper fall in Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI)  measures for both manufacturing and service sector activity, suggesting accelerating contraction for a third successive quarter in the Eurozone, effectively a recession.

Sharply rising production costs due to rising fuel prices, and falling consumer purchases due to unemployment and austerity are also hitting production hard. A backdrop of slowing growth in Brazil, India and China, key to German exports, along with continued question marks over the US economy have not helped either. Ireland and Britain showed contracting growth again at the end of March, joining Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal and Greece in recession, and Spain followed suit at the end of April. The French economy has almost certainly joined them, with only Germany keeping its head barely above water so far.

All in all a series of mutually reinforcing trends are driving the Eurozone back towards recession. Austerity hits growth, growth drives governments to borrow more, rising debt creates investor panic, hiking interest rates and slashing credit ratings. The result is accelerating debt and renewed demands for austerity to appease the bond markets.

The rain in Spain

Spain has rapidly become the weakest link in the Eurozone. Despite a lower debt-to-GDP ratio than many EU countries, recession and rising bond prices have seen its debt grow quickly, jumping nearly 25 per cent in one year to a predicted 79.8 per cent of GDP by the end of 2012. Spain was at the centre of a huge property bubble that burst with the global recession of 2008. Spanish banks, staggering under a mountain of toxic property loans, took the biggest slice of ECB loans, jumping in March to a record 227.6 billion euros or 63 per cent of the Eurozone total net borrowing from the bank. These loans have gone not only to the deficit-spending Spanish government but to help rollover their bad real estate loans.

When the ECB lending figures came out in mid-April, showing the Spanish banks and government leaning on Draghi’s cheap credit, fears about deficits turned into panic. The Spanish banks are propping up the Spanish government and vice versa. What if one proves insolvent? It will bring down the other, leaving the ECB on the hook for hundreds of billions of euros. Coupled with the drip-feed of bad news, it sparked a stampede to the exits. Throughout April, Spanish bond yields rose sharply back to the levels at the height of the late 2011 crisis, to over 6 per cent by the end of the month, while Italian bond yields followed close behind. Seven per cent is seen as the point of no return where debt and interest rates take off in a vicious spiral. Shares slid on international exchanges while the euro fell against the dollar. Lyn Graham-Taylor, a Rabobank strategist, said: “We’re back in full crisis mode. It is looking more and more likely that Spain is going to have some form of a bailout.” Italy is not doing much better, despite both governments implementing vicious austerity packages.

The net results of April’s string of bad news were Eurozone debt rising to 87.2 per cent of GDP, the highest level since the euro’s launch in 1999, and global stock markets (measured by the MSCI world equity index) falling 1.4 per cent, after rising the rest of the year.

Political shocks

The Russian revolutionary Lenin famously said, “Politics is concentrated economics”. On 23 April proved this to be true as a new, political dimension to austerity came to the fore. The Dutch Prime Minister resigned after his coalition partners failed to agree a hard enough austerity package, and the narrow victory of Francois Hollande the Socialist Party candidate in the French presidential first round elections the day further spooked the markets.

In his victory speech, Hollande announced “Europe is watching us, austerity can no longer be the only option” and says France will not ratify the new EU fiscal treaty unless it is renegotiated to include a “growth pact”. However, he has also signalled compromise with Merkel and Draghi’s austerity supplemented by eurobonds that would not pool (“mutualise”) Germany’s debts and credit rating with the crisis-hit periphery – something German capitalists will not countenance since it would threaten to drag Germany down with the poorer countries – but ECB bonds developed specifically for infrastructure and industrial investment. Germany already compromised over the Draghi long-term refinancing operation (LTRO) stimulus in December. No doubt there is room for convergence between Hollande and Merkel.

This austerity-lite would mean continued cuts and neoliberal “reforms” to public services, pensions and workers’ legal rights. This is effectively Keynesian spending that at best might act to stabilise unemployment at its current high levels.

Who will pay?

With the ECB’s trillion euro stimulus wearing off so quickly and the re-emergence of the Eurozone recession, the question of bailouts returns. More and more analysts are predicting that Ireland, Spain and even Greece again will require fresh bailouts this year. The “realistic” solution to such a crisis is to muddle through with compromises along two lines: the ECB monetising debt – something already begun with Draghi’s boosted LTRO programme – and then controlled defaults into the new bailout fund operational in July, the €500 billion European Stability Mechanism (ESM). The problem is: if the government or banking system in Spain or Italy goes bust, the ECB is now on the hook for hundreds of billions in worthless loans and assets. And how many trillions of euros more can the ECB print without unleashing a disastrous inflation? Meanwhile Italy is the Eurozone’s third largest economy, and Spain its fourth, twice the size of Portugal, Greece and Ireland combined. Bailing out those smaller countries caused tremendous strains and crises, a bailout of Spain would in current circumstances bankrupt and rip apart the Eurozone. This is where Francois Hollande comes in, to force more concessions out of the German government, both to stave off such an explosive crisis for as long as possible, to minimise its impact when it comes, and to produce big enough resources to contain it.

What is for certain is that the longer the crisis goes on, the more the global bankers and bond market funds like Pimco will line up behind the only workable strategy that means their loans get paid: super-austerity and extreme neoliberalism. This necessarily entails attacks on democracy and workers’ rights, and support for the most reactionary governments able to repress resistance.

The “markets” (the term the big capitalist barons and finance houses hide behind) have applied unyielding pressure for this solution throughout the crisis, and while France and Germany, behind the ECB and EU, could wring write-downs out of Greece’s creditors, they are not strong enough to do so repeatedly. Capital would haemorrhage out of Europe. In reality Hollande and his supporters in the Eurozone hierarchy will not stand against the markets in the final analysis.

A barbaric future of poverty for Europe’s workers is the only “sustainable” way for capitalism to go forward. The alternative to this is not Hollande’s austerity-lite but building massive resistance across borders to austerity and in defence of our welfare states, led by a new revolutionary international aiming to go beyond the best rotten “unity” Eurozone capitalists can achieve with a Socialist United States of Europe.

In recent years rising oil prices, in part due to the instability caused by imperialist war in the Middle East, has brought heightened interest in hydraulic fracturing (fracking), as a method of extracting more fossil fuels from oil and gas wells.

Fracking essentially involves pumping hundreds of thousands of litres of water mixed with toxic chemicals into the ground at very high pressure, either into an old and partially spent oil or gas well, or into a hole drilled specifically for the purpose. This mixture opens up cracks in the rock deep underground, forcing out gas and oil. Approximately 50 to 70 per cent of the fluid pumped into the ground remains there.

The process came to public attention last year, when a site run by energy company Cuadrilla near Blackpool was linked to the first confirmed case of earthquakes directly caused by fracking in the UK. Scientists have known for a long time that fracking can cause earthquakes, but there have been mixed reports about just how serious the effects could be.

Some researchers are convinced that the process can produce only very low magnitude earthquakes, barely big enough to notice.

Others have voiced concern over the large volume of toxic fluid that is left in the ground, arguing that earthquakes can cause this fluid to migrate through the natural underground fissures that hydraulic fracturing makes use of. They fear that earthquakes will allow fracking fluid to reach the aquifers from which water supplies are drawn.

One thing that is certain in the current economic downturn – as well as in the heightened tensions between the old imperialist heartlands and the Middle East – is that any source of fossil fuel will be exploited, regardless of the environmental cost. It is after all profit and not the environment that motivates the companies that promote the fracking of these wells.

The UK government is serving their agenda by ignoring the advice of researchers and approving further oil well exploitation after the Blackpool earthquakes.

In addition, government policy allows fracking companies to regulate the pollutants they put into the ground themselves. With no official watchdogs to hold them to account, it is community and grassroots campaigns that are on the frontline against fracking.

We are in favour of a suspension of fracking to prevent vast quantities of toxic chemicals being put into the ground without oversight or control.

And we believe that dependence on the exploitation of fossil fuels needs to be phased out, with investment in sustainable energy financed by the taxation of the biggest oil and gas producers and those who pollute the environment.

This investment should be directed both towards large infrastructure projects, such as wind farms, and towards smaller, more distributed methods such as solar panels.

The 57 year old activist had been given a life sentence following the Old Bailey bombings in 1973, then released in 1980 following a prolonged hunger strike in which she had been force-fed over 400 times. She had been suffering from tuberculosis and weighed five stones. Her release had been based on a royal pardon.

Northern Ireland secretary Owen Patterson signed an order revoking her parole licence claiming that she had encouraged support for an illegal organisation. This amounted to holding up the script of a message read out at an Easter commemoration from a masked man representing the Real IRA.

Marian’s lawyers pointed out that she was not on licence and there was no legal right to detain her as her release was based on a royal pardon. Patterson’s lawyers were unable to find the royal document – the only copy of which it would appear was conveniently destroyed in 2010 – hence their claim it was not a pardon but a conditional release! After her arrest, the judge granted her bail only for Marian to be immediately rearrested on Patterson’s orders.

Last July Marian was further charged with “providing property for the purposes of terrorism”, linked to the Massereene shootings of two soldiers. But as Eamonn McCann points out, she “had been questioned for two days about this allegation in November 2009 and released without charge. There was no change in circumstances in the interim and no new evidence offered.” Again the court offered her bail only for Patterson to overrule.

It is patently obvious that Marian’s detention is not about her being guilty of a serious crime, but about the British government’s desire to silence her. As Bernadette McAliskey commented at a recent protest in Belfast: “This is a clear message that no dissent will be tolerated. You challenge the status quo at your peril.” In short, don’t oppose the Good Friday Agreement!

The British government would love to fool us into believing that a just peace reigns in the north of Ireland – but the reality is different. It is British repression that reigns supreme. Maghaberry republican prisoners are still subject to beatings and strip-searches. Loyalist parades continue to march through nationalist areas. Raids and beatings are regularly dished out in the pursuit of ‘dissident’ republicans. The northern state is still a sectarian prison house for all those that identify with a united Ireland.

Marian has been illegally incarcerated for a year now. She had been locked up in the all-male prison at Maghaberry and put in isolation. This long-term solitary confinement is a form of torture. Due to a serious deterioration in her health she has been transferred to the hospital wing of Hydebank prison where she still remains in isolation. The authorities are intent on breaking her body and spirit. Many protests have taken to the streets in Ireland.

We must call on Britain to drop the charges and release Marian Price now!

THE HEADY combination of big business, land development, local and national politics, and the struggle for international prestige has always ensured that major sporting events like the Olympics are fraught with issues for the communities that live and work near them.

Few people, however, could have expected the news that ground-based surface-to-air missiles would be deployed in residential areas in East London to “protect” the Olympic site in Stratford from unspecified threats from the air.

Residents of the 700-apartment Bow Quarter complex are understandably concerned that a battery of missiles could be based on their rooftop water tower, with one resident, journalist Brian Whelan, mounting a legal challenge against the owner of the complex, questioning their right to allow the Ministry of Defence to place the missiles there.

On top of the fear of accidents or explosions, there is the news that armed police may be required to protect the team of around 10 soldiers who will operate the missile battery, bringing with it the prospect that the area might become a target for terrorist attack.

As a recent Stop the War Coalition newsletter put it, this news gives the lie to the idea that the war in Afghanistan is being fought “so that we don’t have to fight on the streets of London”, showing instead that the war “has made Britain a more dangerous place”.