TIONAL AGAINST picket outside the prison on May 17 showed that the fight goes on.
Doin JoLu Campaianers have welcomed Jack Straw's decision to scrap the "primary purpose" rule, one of the battery of racist laws and restrictions introduced by the Tories. But the fight for the repeal of the Asylum and Immigration Act goes on, with many still detained in British jails and camps for the "crime" of seeking asylum. Among them are 12 detainees at Birmingham's Winson Green Prison, who have not taken food since May 5. A solidarity LOLA MORE "unthinkable" thoughts are being dragged out of the monetarist closet as New Labour goes to town on what the Tories have left of the welfare state.
Education and Employment Secretary David Blunkett had reportedly told Sir Ron Dearing to ensure that his inquiry into the funding of higher education "thinks the unthinkable", with the probable result of proposals for a voucher scheme.
In well-trailed leaks to the Blairite Guardian newspaper we read that Labour is looking towards Frank Field's old idea of "individual learning accounts", where a minimal state contribution of a voucher towards tuition fees would be added to savings built up by wealthy parents while their children were at school.
Students from less than wealthy families would face the prospect of debts as high as €20.000 hanging round their necks on graduation. Nothing could more clearly define a two-tier education service.
Having abandoned the principle of free higher education funded collectively through taxation, New Labour is reverting to the brutal old system in which the rich enjoy easy access and many working class youth are deterred by the heavy costs and the uncertainty of finding a job paying enough to be able to repay the debt.
Field: the unspeakable in pursuit Harry Sloan MARGARET Thatcher may have come for tea and a chat with Tony Blair - to give him an extra chance to annoy the left and insult the unions - but Labour's most dogged Tory is now a fixture in the new political establishment, and much more dangerous.
Frank Field is now ensconced as Minister for Welfare Reform in the new Labour government-perhaps the only appointment that might make his immediate superior, Harriet Harman, appear liberal, even left wing by comparison.
Harman, after all, correctly denounced the proposals of then Social Security Secretary Peter Lilley for compulsory privatised pensions as a "chilling prospect". What will chill many Labour voters is that Field, now her junior minister, welcomed the Lilley plan, and is best known for advocating similar policies, based on the measures introduced by Chile's brutal military dictatorship.
Favourite
Field has repeatedly been praised by top Tories including Thatcher herself, former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, and archthinking the unthinkable": so too of course was Adolf Hitler.
Behind the rat-like features, Field is a vicious witch-hunter, and a right wing religious zealot wiin no sarea or respect or compassion for working class people or the labour movement.
Leave school at 14?
Among the "unthinkable" notions he has served up - eagerly purveyed by the Tory press - have been the introduction of a "flexible school leaving age", on the grounds that schools are failing many working class youth who "at 14 are ready for work". This scarcely coincides with new Labour's mantra of "education, education, education".
Field has also suggested that married mothers should be allowed to cash in their child benefit, using the "new found wealth" to buy training or set up small businesses!
Ten years ago Field suggested that young people and the unemployed should be given "training accounts", with which they could buy their own training package.
This was too radical even for John Lister Thatcher's government to implement. Now he proposes to privatise student grants.
But the common factor is that the radicalism is always directed not against capitalism, for which Field has a fawning respect verging on adulation, but against the victims of capitalism, the working class people exploited by business and attacked by 18 years of Tory government.
Field's immediate target is to carry through Peter Lilley's plan to scrap the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS), and funnel contributions into private pension schemes.
But his influence as a dogged proponent of privatisation and the "tough love" notion of press ganging the unemployed from the dole into low-paid jobs will permeate beyond his own department.
Far from being a "maverick" as the press still label him, Field represents the brutal essence of New Labour drawn out to its logical conclusion:
He is, to borrow Oscar Wilde's famous phrase on fox-hunting, the unspeakable in pursuit of the unthinkable. strict censorship and a curfew were In a field of his own: Frank admires handiwork of Pinochet's dictatorship. Unfortunately he is no maverick. Socialist Quikook "There's no no has duda quees