Fringe: The cost of war in the Middle East and Latin America

The lunchtime event in Brighton, chaired by PCS vice president Hannah David, heard from a number of speakers about the need for trade union international solidarity with people in countries affected by war.

Jess Barnard, Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s trade union organiser, said that domination and subjugation have been the reality for many years for Palestinian people, but political support from Trump’s administration have deepened crimes. And she said that Israel has ramped up its attempts to destroy Palestinian civil society groups.

“We should never be neutral in the face of injustice from Palestine to Cuba, Venezuela to Sudan,” she said. “The UK government has failed Palestinian workers and the labour movement must answer the call.”

She recommended union activists download and use the PSC workplace organising toolkit. 

Attacks on civil liberties 

Lindsey German, co-founder of the Stop the War Coalition, praised the 250,000 people who joined the Nabka march in London on Saturday. 

She said that we are in an even more dangerous situation now than when Stop the War was founded 25 years ago.

“We’re seeing a cost-of-living crisis which is going to be massively exacerbated by the war on Iran,” she said.

She also highlighted the “incredibly serious” attacks in civil liberties.

“There’s a huge attack on people’s right to protest and the right to demonstrate and we have to oppose that,” she said. “We need to make a bigger anti-war movement and peace movement around the world.”

Stop the War is holding an international conference against war in London on 20 June, with speakers including Lindsey and our general secretary Fran Heathcote.

Fran told the fringe meeting that PCS is very proud to support solidarity and anti-war campaigns and that clearly our efforts need to continue.

“It’s the right thing to call out injustice, whether that’s the crimes of Trump, Netanyahu or our own government,” she said. “It’s important that trade unions speak up and speak out, but it (the consequences of war) also affects our members directly in higher inflation and driving down their living standards.”

She said the political class has got it wrong time after time, but people in the UK and around the world have been proved right to oppose war. She rallied the room by ending her speech: “Let’s continue to be a movement for peace and justice.”

Khalid Sidahmed from the MENA Solidarity Network which builds solidarity links with workers in the Middle East and North Africa said Sudan had seen 17 military coups since independence in 1956. He said that the arms trade is at the heart of the disaster in the country. 

“The war continues and the people continue to organise,” he said. “Our duty as trade unionists is to stand together and continue to improve our understanding of the meaning of injustice.”

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