(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . ACM: Increasing Attacks on Civil and Human Rights in France and Britain [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-23 Protesters gather at Place de la Bastille in Paris. Pic: AP One of the highlights of this week was my attendance at an on-meeting on the situation in France. Essentially, what has happened is that the French government decided to increase the pension age from 62 to 64 as of 2030 in January 2023. The minimum age to receive a pension is to be increased by 3 months every year beginning in 2023. Moreover, people will be required to have worked at least 43 years to get a full pension; working longer means you can get a higher pension. This has resulted in a massive outburst of anger all over France and quite honestly it is not only the left and trade unions that have been involved in the protests (as stated in the Le Monde article above) and strikes that still continue in France. What has been interesting (although unsurprising) is the fact that women are on the frontlines of the protests and the struggles against these reforms. The reality is that these protests were still ongoing in early March. As Dave Kellaway states: “Commentators on TV had to accept that the sixth national strike wave against President Macron’s attempt to make workers retire at 64 rather than 62 was as well supported as previous days. Even the official Interior Ministry figures said there were 1.3 million people who demonstrated in more than 200 towns and cities, while the biggest trade union, the CGT, said there were 3.5 million. One of the strongest features of the mobilisation is the nationwide extent of strikes and demonstrations. […] Millions of people are continuing to give up a day’s pay to participate in the mobilisation. One person who spoke with the Nouvel Observateur (New Observer) claimed that it had already cost him about €600, but it was worth it to maintain the right to retire at 62. Workers would also have to put 43 years of pension contributions into the pot to get a full pension. Trains were stopped, schools emptied, and planes were cancelled as the air traffic controllers took action. Another area where there had already been strikes on other issues was the energy sector, where there was strong support. Students and youth were prominent at the demonstrations. Some schools and universities were blocked.” To add further insult and increasing the fury of the French, on March 16th Macron and the French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne invoked Article 49.3 of the French Constitution to push the controversial pension plan through. Article 49.3 enables the Executive branch to avoid bringing pieces to legislation to the National Assembly following deliberation at a Cabinet Meeting. These sections of the French constitution were put in under Charles De Gaulle who wanted a more Presidential system and a way to override the legislature to ensure “the stability of the French political system”; thereby creating a far more powerful executive to counter the legislature. De Gaulle did not want an unrestrained Parliamentary system, and insisted that these sections were added to the French Constitution. These sections give power to the French President and the Prime Minister at the expense of the legislature; in a situation where the President’s political party doesn’t have a majority in the National Assembly, paragraph (sector) 3 of the French Constitution provides a President a way to force through their policies independent of the legislation. Macron’s deliberations with his cabinet were ongoing up until the vote for Pensions reform bill in the National Assembly; there were serious doubt that it would have passed the National Assembly (or he would not have used Article 49.3 to get his pension reform through). Macron and the government survived the 2 votes of no-confidence (the first by a centrist coalition and the second called by Le Pen) on the 21st of March and on the 14th of April, the French Constitutional Court approved the key provisions of the pension reform and it has now become law. In an article appearing in SCMP, the passage of the bill is noted: “The nine-member Constitutional Council ruled in favour of key provisions of the reform, including raising the retirement age to 64 and extending the years of work required for a full pension, saying the legislation was in accordance with French law. Six minor proposals were rejected, including forcing large companies to publish how many over-55s they employ, and the creation of a special contract for older workers.” The Resistance Resistance to the pension reform is strong and is occurring throughout the country and it is continuing; these include strikes which have almost shut down the French economy and ongoing protests and these have faced increased police repression. The question arises whether this unrest (and I really wished the British could be a little more like the French) is more than just a response to pension reform and instead reflects a wider crisis in Neoliberal economies themselves? Ugo Pahleta addresses this question in an article initially posted in Posle: “The movement that has been developing in France since January 19 is exciting in many ways. In just two months, it has profoundly changed the political atmosphere of the country, rolled back the prevailing defeatism, destabilised (even frightened) the zealous defenders of the established social order and neoliberal policies, broadened the horizons of expectation for the millions of people who have entered into struggle and, in doing so, begun to take the measure of their strength. Above all, this mobilisation has accentuated the crisis of hegemony that has been deepening in France for years, in particular by revealing the extent to which the Macronist regime is socially isolated. It has crystallised social discontent that had not necessarily found the way to express itself politically and has transformed into legitimate rage the widespread mistrust of a large part of the population — especially the working class and youth — for Macron and his government. 2 From this point on, the issue is no longer just the counter-reform of pensions. It is no longer simply “social”, in the restrictive sense of trade unions. It is eminently and fully political: as soon as it became national, taking on a broad social dimension and a permanent rootedness, the movement asserted itself as a confrontation not with this or that capitalist (as in the case of a struggle against redundancies or job cuts in a company), not with this or that sectoral measure (however important it may be), but with the whole of the bourgeois class as it is represented (and defended) by the political regime. In this respect, such a movement is able to open a breach in the political order by permanently modifying the balance of forces between classes. It is also in the nature of a great popular movement to blur the categories used to artificially corset class struggles by separating a “political” level and a “socio-economic” level. Every mass struggle, like the one we are experiencing, is thus inextricably social and political; It inevitably tends to take as its logical target the political regime and the great interests that it embodies: the owners, the exploiters, the ruling class. It is also ideological and cultural, insofar as it questions the narratives (small or large) that the dominant class builds to justify this or that counter-reform, or more broadly their social order with its procession of injustices, alienation and violence, but also in the sense that it engenders a battle between antagonistic conceptions of the world and alternative visions of what society, human relationships, our lives should be.” It is rare that we hear the voices of protestors directly and the debates on strategy of the left itself so that we have an idea of the depth of resistance and the state of the movement, (if a movement itself exists) or whether the situation is it moving towards the development of a general movement. Is the movement concentrated on pension reforms? Has it been able to coalesce to a general struggle? The violence of response by the French government and police is impressive and one cannot help wondering why the government has moved so strongly against the protestors; where is the vaunted democracy of France and is this again part of the decline of liberal democracies themselves? Especially concerning is the increase in police repression against protestors and strikers which are clearly trying to break the movement itself. According to Leon Cremieux, the government has recruited scabs to break the strikes and to split the inter-union movement. “Faced with powerful strikes in refineries and waste collection, the government had multiplied requisitions of strikers to break the movement. French law authorises requisitions in the event of “manifest disturbance to public order”. The prefect of the department of Seine Maritime had requisitioned personnel from the Total Energies refineries because of “the foreseeable increase in traffic for the Easter weekend”. The administrative tribunal had already denounced bans on demonstrations at the last minute. Now it has just judged that these requisitions “carried a serious and manifestly unlawful violation of the right to strike”. Obviously, the government is testing how far it can push the interpretation of the laws and wants to prepare the ground for two new laws tabled by the Republicans in the Senate, limiting the right to strike in refineries and public transport. In the register of democratic rights, the Republicans, the National Rally and Macron’s deputies have just adopted, in an accelerated first reading, in the Senate and the National Assembly an “Olympic Games” law which, under the guise of security, establishes in a sustainable way control, filtering and mass surveillance devices in public places and transport by video surveillance with algorithmic behaviour analysis tools, which can be stored.” In the same article, Leon Crémieux also raises concerns that the movement has up until now not moved beyond the question of raising the pension age despite obvious concerns of the attack on democracy and wider social issues (e.g., unemployment benefits) and the lack of unity in the coalition around wider issues. “Another problem is increasingly evident. Although in essence the movement is a class movement, bringing together, in action or in support, the vast majority of workers, with in the background the refusal to continue paying for the maintenance of a system that attacks the working classes, there does not emerge in the movement the expression of demands that go beyond the question of retirement at 64.” But without a doubt these strikes and protests are some of the most significant responses in France to neoliberalism; whether they are able to push beyond the pension age point of unity remains unclear. The Meeting I have no idea of the depth of the coverage of the current situation in France, but if it is anything like what is happening over in Britain, you get some information, pictures of police violence against protestors, but not information directly from protestors beyond sound-bites. We also rarely hear information indicating how significant this latest series of protests are and what they are reflecting about political dynamics in France. So, this Thursday, I attended a meeting organised by Anti*Capitalist resistance entitled “France in Revolt: Macron must Go.” The only speaker was Justine, an activist Anti-Capitalist Youth of the NPA (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste) to hear from someone on the ground, especially a voice of a younger person from their youth movement. The protests have a strong component of younger people and understanding their participation is important. I thought that the meeting was actually very good and have decided to share it with comrades on the Anti-Capitialist Meetup and not only was the presentation very clear and informative, but the questions asked by participants enabled the speaker to go into greater detail on those issues. x YouTube Video Are the French and British Governments Colluding? In the discussion part of the meeting, someone asked a question about the arrest on April 18th of the foreign rights manager Ernest Moret of Éditions la Fabrique (a left-wing French book publisher). In a situation which was best described by Simon Pearson in his article The Arrest as Kafkaesque, Moret who had come to London to participate in the London Book Fair, was stopped as he left the Eurostar in London. Let me reiterate this … the British Border Police stopped him at St Pancras Station under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act (2000); counter-terrorism laws were used by British border police to stop and then interrogate a representative of a French left-wing publisher. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, the right to protest … all are under attack in the so-called liberal democracies (and not only in Europe). He was questioned for 6 hours about his participation in the anti-Pension reform protests in France and whether books that his publishing firm published were written by anti-pension reform protestors. The reality is that he was not arrested in France because he had not contravened French law. Instead, he was stopped at the British border and questioned for 6 hours. When he refused to provide the passwords to his computer and his mobile phone, they were seized by the police and he was arrested for “wilfully obstructing a Schedule 7 examination contrary to contrary to section 18 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The police still have his computer and phone.” He was later released on bail after having been detained for almost 24 hours and yes, they still have his computer and phone. Several questions arise, why would the British police believe that Moret had participated in the anti-pension reform protests and why would they care? How would they even know about his participation in these protests? Clearly his being stopped was at the instigation of the French government. In an interview with The Telegraph, Jean Morisot one of the editors of Éditions la Fabrique said: “We don’t know why he’s specifically been arrested. But it seems clear there is an exchange of information and methods between the British and French police here. It is part of a slide toward a surveillance society. […] It seems to be an attempt to exert a form of pressure on political groups and militants to weaken and disorganise any opposition. Any environmental or union activist who demonstrates too vehemently is put on police files and bothered and hunted down. That appears to be what has happened here with the aid of the British police.” 12 Members of the European Parliament have written to the British Home Office to express their outrage at the interrogation and arrest of Moret accusing the British government of infringing basic human rights and abusing anti-terrorism laws; the French government has been accused of “outsourcing intimidation to the British police.” The international writer’s association PEN and the National Union of Journalists condemned the interrogation and arrest of Moret. A joint statement by Verso Books and Éditions la Fabrique was released and a protest was called. This certainly represents an attack on freedom of speech and the right to protest, but these have already been under attack in Britain for some time. The erosion of basic civil and human rights in Britain has been used against a French publisher and this was instigated by the French government. Yes, they are colluding and even more so we need to ask the obvious question about the clear decline of liberal democracies in Europe. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/23/2165482/-ACM-Increasing-Attacks-on-Civil-and-Human-Rights-in-France-and-Britain Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/