The Left Berlin News & Comment

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Month: April 2021

Legalisierung Jetzt

For the permanent and unconditional legalisation of all migrants


23/04/2021

The current situation calls on us as a network of migrant and anti-racist groups and organizations in Berlin to demand the permanent and unconditional legalization of all migrants without residence documents in this country.

It is estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 undocumented migrants live in Berlin. There are many reasons why they are in this situation.

The situation of this social group is marked by precariousness and social invisibility. They suffer from lack of access to health, housing, education, decent work and exercise of a free life, which shows that human rights are not for everyone.

In the German context we have two particular problems as follows – On one hand the policies of criminalization, persecution and control of migration, on the other, the silencing of this reality in the German society. Both contribute to rendering the undocumented population invisible. One example of this politically produced invisibility the lack of qualitative and quantitative data, which prevents us from knowing how many they are, where they are and which urgencies are pressing them.

Today, facing a global pandemic, it is time to break the taboo and proceed towards full citizenship rights for all undocumented migrants. That is why we demand the following from the corresponding authorities

1. The extraordinary, universal, urgent and permanent legalization of all migrants in an irregular situation in Berlin.

2. That the procedure to be implemented towards this put migrants at the center as subjects with rights and guarantee the concrete access to and the promotion of these rights.

3. Legalization by means of existing legal instruments such as § 23(1) of the Residence Act (AufenthG), which could be used to grant residence to persons in an irregular migration status on humanitarian grounds.

4. Abolition of paragraph 87 of the Residence Act, which requires that employees of public bodies, (with the exception of educational bodies), transfer to the immigration authority (Ausländerbehörde) the personal data of anyone in an illegal situation.

LEGALISATION NOW! Join us to demand legalization; the current crisis shows more clearly that no one should be excluded from fundamental social rights!

Speculators Love This Trick

Germany’s Constitutional Court has overturned the Berlin rent cap – what does this mean for the tenants’ movement?


22/04/2021

Suddenly everything happened very quickly. Only two days before the verdict was to be announced, information leaked that the Federal Constitutional Court would publish its decision on the Berlin rent cap on the 15th of April. The announcement also came as a surprise because there had not even been an oral hearing on the matter. The decision was drastic: The Berlin rent cap, which would have frozen and partially lowered rents for the next five years, was declared “null and void” because the state of Berlin had no jurisdiction in this area.

According to the court, the federal legislature had already made regulations in this regard, especially with the (unfortunately ineffective) Mietpreisbremse (rent brake). The overturning of the rent cap means that landlords can now demand higher rents, even retroactively. With its ruling, the court explicitly did not decide on the “proportionality” of the rent restrictions, but only on the formal legal question of jurisdiction.

How did the rent cap come about?

The political significance of the ruling is best understood from the way the law came about. In 2018, the jurist Peter Weber published a legal paper arguing that the federal states could enact regulations on maximum rents because of their jurisdiction over housing. An experimental, but not implausible argument. Weber had previously failed in his attempt to enter into discussion with the Linke-controlled Senate Department for Urban Development on the matter. However, his article was taken up by some Berlin SPD members.

However, their initiative would probably not have received much attention if the campaign “Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen!” had not caused a stir at the same time. The massive popularity of the campaign, also among the SPD base, put the SPD leadership under pressure to launch “something of its own” (Mayor Michael Müller, SPD). Therefore, Weber’s idea for an expansive interpretation of state competence in housing policy was further pursued by the SPD.

Its parliamentary group in the Berlin House of Representatives commissioned an expert opinion to back up Weber’s arguments and created a typically social democratic campaign with the slogan “build – cap – buy”. Internally, the campaign served its purpose. An SPD party conference voted against supporting the expropriation demand – albeit barely, with significant bloc of almost 40 percent support for expropriation. Michael Müller had been able to win over the party congress with the argument that with the rent cap the SPD now had “something of its own” of which it could be proud.

Die LINKE (the Left party) reacted hesitantly to the initiative at first, but then quickly adopted it. Partly against the resistance of the SPD-influenced administration and in cooperation with many external advisors, the then left-wing Senator for Urban Development, Katrin Lompscher, drafted a corresponding law, which not only meant a freeze on rents to a large extent, but even the lowering of existing rents. Violations of the law were to be punished with heavy fines. The SPD leadership became a little queasy about this implementation of their initiative. This led to fierce disputes within the coalition about how consistently Berlin wanted to use its legal authority. With some toning down, the law was finally passed.

The landlord lobby enters the scene

The landlords and their political lobby (CDU, FDP and AfD) went to war against the law from day one: the house owners went on a landlords’ strike and thereby artificially reduced the supply of housing in the city for people searching. It is true that this violates Berlin’s ban on the misappropriation of housing (Zweckentfremdungsverbot). But when laws are directed against the interests of the owners, conservatives and liberals do not see the “rule of law” so narrowly. Consequently, they interpreted the withholding of flats less as a sign of the willingness of real estate capital to skirt the law, than as evidence of the impossibility of governing “against the market”.

“The house owners went on a landlords’ strike and thereby artificially reduced the supply of housing in the city for people searching.”

The borough administrations, which have been consistently subjected to budget cuts, did not have the means to follow up on this, and police support in urban policy issues is only available when it comes to harassing and evicting self-managed spaces. At the same time, the landlords forced the new tenants to sign so-called shadow tenancy agreements. This refers to the rents that could be demanded without a rent cap. In this way, real estate capital has already built up for the case of the rent cap falling. For tenants, this means that they will be faced with sometimes considerable rent debts if they have to make additional payments. Since many could only afford the flat because it was rented at a lower price due to the rent cap, they could not simply put the money aside. A real social time bomb is now threatening to go off.

The most important counterattack, however, was on the legal level. The CDU and FDP parliamentary groups in the Bundestag filed a Normenkontrollklage (lawsuit for the enforcement of norms) against the rent cap before the Federal Constitutional Court (asking whether the state of Berlin even has the competence and jurisdiction to enact such a law). At the same time, there were numerous proceedings before the regular Berlin courts in conflicts between tenants and landlords. While some courts recognised the rent cap, others referred the law to the Federal Constitutional Court for clarification. The court has now ruled against the interests of tenants in Berlin.

What to do? Cap rents nationwide? Expropriate?

The court’s decision comes at a politically dynamic time. The Constitutional Court explicitly did not rule on the content of the law. This means that the discussion about a nationwide rent cap will now pick up speed. The issue could thus become salient for the federal elections in September. The nationwide campaign Mietenstopp already exists on this issue, which is also supported by the German Tenants’ Association (Deutscher Mieterbund) and the German Trade Union Federation (DGB).

Moreover, now, only half a year before the Berlin state elections, the SPD leadership is under pressure to rethink its stance on Deutsche Wohnen & Co expropriation. They can no longer reassure their base by saying that they already have “something of their own”.

Socialisation is not only more sustainable – it is also legally watertight!

The decision of the Federal Constitutional Court was announced right in the middle of the second collection phase for the Deutsche Wohnen & Co expropriation referendum. The campaign has never seen a contradiction between the rent cap and its demands. However, the rent cap case now adds urgency to the necessity of expropriation. At the same time, the political opponents of the campaign will try to turn the legal defeat of the rent cap against the campaign with the claim “If that’s not possible, then expropriation is even more impossible”.

However, this misses a crucial fact: the interpretation of the question of competence for the rent cap was legally disputed, including by the legal consultancy services (Wissenschaftliche Dienste) of the German national Parliament, which have denied the state competence. For the expropriation demand, however, the same services concluded that it is legal. Socialisation is therefore not only more sustainable – it is also legally watertight!

Kalle Kunkel is organised in the Interventionist Left (Interventionistische Linke) and is active in the campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen.

This article first appeared in German on the Analyse & Kritik Website. Reproduced with permission. Translator Ian Clotworthy is also active in Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen.

Spain: Government split over Trans rights

In both Germany and Spain, the right of Trans people to change their gender is strongly contested


21/04/2021

To mark March 31st, the international Transgender Day of Visibility, affected people in Germany and elsewhere have demanded a revision of the so-called transsexual laws that have been in force for 40 years. In a corresponding position paper, the “Bundesverband Trans” (Federal Association Trans) has pointed out the reactionary nature of the regulations currently in force.

In particular, the effort that Trans people must make to change their gender is currently much too high. Instead of the current requirement of having to produce two legal assessments, the association demands that in the future the self-assessment of the affected person should be enough.

What may happen in Germany sometime in the distant future is almost reality in Spain. The corresponding text of a so-called Trans law has been waiting on the desks of ministers for two months already, without having been passed into law. It stipulates that people should be free to decide their gender, without having to undergo treatment or be pathologized.

Yet while the Madrid coalition agreement of the social democratic PSOE and the left-wing alliance Unidas Podemos stress that this is the “first feminist government since the end of the dictatorship,” both the coalition partners and the country’s feminist movement are split on this issue.

Above all, the PSOE is hesitating with its consent. Most recently, the social democrats suggested a requirement of at least one witness for an official change in gender – similar to a change of name. There is also discussion of the introduction of a 6 month “reflection period,” in which any “abuse” of the law could be prevented. Such an “abuse” could occur, for example, if a man were to change his gender to “female” in order to by-pass or make use of laws to defend women.

Such accusations have been made in recent months by conservative social democrats, in particular from the “Spanish Feminist Party” (PFE). In February, the PFE was thrown out of the left alliance Unidas Podemos because of its positions against Trans people.

Although the party does not exist on a national basis, its positions have received a lot of coverage in the media. The leader Lidia Falcón’s remarks that women have been “replaced by” Trans people, which is the result of a “gay lobby” have appalled a large part of the Left. The PFE describes the currently proposed legislation as a “postmodern weapon of the patriarchy.”

After several Trans activists started a hunger strike on 10 May, the Catalonia ERC and Más País announced that they would bring the law forward for a parliamentary vote. Since then, though, nothing more has happened. Several organisations have therefore announced new resistance to a change to the proposed law. On Tuesday [6 April], the organisation DELGTB, the foundations Triángulo and Chrysallis, and the Association of Family Members of Underage Trans People started a national campaign.

If the law is passed in Spain, it would be the furthest reaching in the European Union. Until now, only Luxembourg, Ireland, Portugal, Denmark and Malta allow an official change of gender without pathologising those affected – and even in those countries only with restrictions.

This article first appeared in German in the 9 April edition of the junge Welt. Translation; Phil Butland. Reproduced with permission. Trial subscription of the junge Welt available here.

“The Market and Profit Have No Place in a Health Service”

On being blacklisted, nurses’ pay under Covid-19 and the state of the National Health Service


20/04/2021

Karen Reissmann, psychiatric nurse and active trade-unionist in Manchester, was recently fined £10,000 for organising a small protest rally against the meagre government pay offer of 1% – here she talks to David Paenson

Thank you Karen for giving up your time for this interview. My first question: could you tell us a little about yourself and your work?

I began training as a psychiatric nurse in January 1982 and have been working as such ever since. I was elected shop steward within six weeks and I was on my first strike within three months. There were quite a few to follow.

Can you recount any?

In 1988 we had big demonstrations and strikes against Margaret Thatcher’s policy of reducing taxes by 2% whilst cutting the health service. Our strike struck a chord with the general population. Which is why Thatcher finally offered a revised grading system. But this involved everyone applying individually. That was extremely divisive.

Our rulers always seem to have a trick up their sleeves …

Indeed. Our next big dispute was in 2005–2006 against cuts in the community mental health teams. We struck for some 70 or 80 days over a period of six months. Because of my role in these strikes I was made redundant and blacklisted. But we did manage to suspend the cuts for a further nine years.

Blacklists for nurses?

We took them to court over that and I was eventually given compensation out of court, but I didn’t get my job back.

The irony is that I am now working again for my old boss, since the trust that employed me merged with my original trust. The health service in the UK is national, but it is divided up into countless trusts and outsourced units, which are perpetually involved in mutual takeovers and mergers.

Could your £10,000 fine have something to do with you being on a blacklist?

No. The reason behind the heavy fine is the government and the Home Office’s plans for their Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.

In future all protests will need police permission. And even one-man protests and protests that are deemed too loud could be forbidden.

Similar plans over here in Germany. Can you tell us how the pandemic is used to whip up racism?

The government is ramping up its attacks on migrants. So we still have thousands of qualified doctors and nurses who are asylum seekers who, in the middle of a pandemic, are made to sit at home and not permitted to use their skills and talents to save lives.

93 percent of all doctors who died of COVID in the UK were BAME (Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic), and 73 percent of the nurses.

How is the lockdown managed?

In a very racist way. A disproportionate number of black people, poor people too, are fined for breaking regulations, most often in situations where they pose no health threat to others.

But not a single employer has been fined for forcing their employees back to work, telling them “Now, don’t tell anybody you got COVID, just come in and do your work, you seem alright to me”.

That’s awful! How do you explain this mean offer of a 1% pay rise?

The government has become complacent. After the right turn of the Labour Party under Starmer, Johnson and his finance minister Rishi Sunak think they can get away with anything.

Also the trade union leaders are by and large passive and doing their best to avoid any strikes.

And how did you organize your rally of 40 nurses?

It was at very short notice. Their pay offer wasn’t even announced, it was hidden in a little bit of the budget, in the hope that nobody would notice.

And then the explosion of anger was unseen. I would ring people up and before I could even tell them, “Hello, it’s Karen”, I would get “Can you believe what they’ve done!?!”

So we organized a small rally with 40 people attending on a Sunday. All very safe with masks on and two meters apart in the centre of a very deserted Manchester.

So why did the police intervene?

They said that our rally wasn’t lawful. The fact that it was absolutely safe didn’t interest them.

They even threatened to report me to my employer and the Nursing and Midwifery Council to make sure I got struck off the register, and would not be able work as a nurse any more, if I didn’t shut down the rally immediately. So I did.

Then they took me aside and gave me my £10,000 fixed penalty notice. They even wanted to force me into the police van, so that the press wouldn’t be witness to this. A female colleague of mine, who had been standing next to me, got carted off in handcuffs.

Within two hours the £10,000 fine was collected through fund raising. How can you explain that?

The willingness to donate shows the broad solidarity with health workers that exists, but also the anger at the government policies.

One of the government ministers said: “You should be grateful for 1%, some people are getting nothing!” That’s the extent of their arrogance.

But how come the anger on the streets?

A young woman living in London was found dead. Her suspected murderer is a serving police officer, now sitting in prison.

Women tried to organize a protest around this, but the police forbade it. And the court wasn’t helpful either, it just said that the protestors needed to come to an agreement with the police.

In the end the people came to the protest anyway. Thousands of women brought candles, posters and megaphones and started giving speeches. And the police attacked them with batons, literally laid into them, threw them to the ground and pressed their knees into their backs.

Unbelievable!

But again we know that the Home Office is directing the police to do these things. These are political decisions because they want to stamp down on all opposition.

But in a way it backfired on them. The government had to put on a show of being shocked at TV images of police brutality. This illustrates how despite the bravado and the arrogance they put on show, underneath it all they’re actually quite weak

If we did mobilize forces we could stop them with the pay freeze, with their cuts in services, with their incompetent handling of the pandemic.

How can you organize a strike without it hurting patients?

When we went on strike in Manchester it wasn’t easy for us, because we’ve built up a relationship with our patients, their family and friends.

But we tell management: “You know, you are 72 senior managers who are all health qualified, you can come and do our jobs.” It was quite amusing to see how one manager was quite upset at having to go without her carefully painted fingernails on the one day.

But you see, they’ve closed down 17,000 beds over the last ten years, there are 100,000 unfilled vacancies in the NHS: that’s 100,000 people on permanent strike. But no-one blames them for being on strike, a strike ordained by the government!

What do you think of the demand to nationalize the whole of the health care service, including the production of medicines?

I think that’s absolutely right. The market and profit have no place in a health service.

In order to make money, manufacturers prefer to produce a drug that they know people are going to be taking for the rest of their lives, like for arthritis. An anti-biotic that you’ll need for only a few days in order to get rid of an infection is much less profitable. And again, making vaccines for hundreds of millions is extremely profitable.

They also like to market drugs for psychological distress, the causes of which lie elsewhere. Anti-depressants are big money.

What about patents?

We need to produce medicines for people the world over. If COVID-19 and other diseases are not fought globally we will never overcome this pandemic. New mutants will continually crop up and the enormous amounts we spent on developing vaccines will simply go down the drain.

Vast sums of money are continually being wasted. It is estimated that over 20% of the funding for the British health service goes entirely towards the mechanisms of the market: paying people to write contracts, to sit on panels, to sort out the billing within different bits of the health service…

What does the future have in store for us?

There is a broad willingness to strike and to protest.

The left need to organize on the ground. We can’t leave it to left-wing trade union leaders who more often than not are held back by the more right-wing trade union leaders. So we need more independent networking.

Thank you Karen for this wonderful interview!

Can’t Pay! Won’t Pay!

Poll Tax in Britain. Lessons for the campaign for the Mietendeckel


19/04/2021

The introduction of the Mietendeckel or rent controls in Berlin was big news for tenants in Britain. It showed that reforms could be fought for and won. Its overruling is a cause for concern here in London, where rents are already astronomical high.

In one stroke, the Constitutional Court has plunged millions of Berliners into debt and has left many wondering where they will find the money. Of course this has not passed unopposed and the magnificent spontaneous demonstration in Neukölln and Kreuzberg shows that it will be fought. The likelihood of resistance has already led one housing company to declare that it will not be collecting the back rent.

So as Berliners consider their next moves it is worth looking at an example from the UK where the government tried to tax a large percentage of the population in a way that it had not done before. It was called The Poll Tax.

In 1989 in Scotland and 1990 in the rest of the UK, the Thatcher government abolished the old system of tax collection for localities known as ‘the rates’ which had been based on the notional rental value of the property that you lived in. In its place, Thatcher introduced a flat rate national charge, about which its architects boasted that, ‘the Duke and the Dustman will pay the same.’

Margaret Thatcher was a decisive figure in British Politics, who had successfully attacked the working class and its organisations in the Trades Unions. She had done so using what were described as ‘salami tactics,’ only taking them on one slice at a time. The introduction of the Community Charge as the Poll Tax was officially known, however, for the first time attacked working people across the board and opposition to it rose dramatically at first in Scotland and then in the rest of the UK.

For example, Mr. W.E. Jones wrote to his Tory MP that he and his wife were in their 70s, living on modest pensions, and under the poll tax would be paying more than twice what they paid under the old system of rates, while better-off people in large houses would be paying less.

There were arguments about how to oppose the Poll Tax in advance of its introduction, and a campaign to encourage people not to register for the tax in the first place. As the burden of payment fell on ordinary people, the slogan ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’, popularised by the Italian leftist playwright Dario Fo, came to the front. ‘Don’t Pay your Poll Tax’ was spray painted on walls the length and breadth of the country and was reproduced on millions of placards for the demonstrations that ensued. Market stallholders everywhere did a roaring trade in “Bollocks to the poll tax” t-shirts.

Thousands of local groups were set up in towns and villages across the country, such as Anti Poll Tax Unions and a national federation called the All Britain Anti Poll Tax Federation.

National demonstrations were called for the 31 March in London and in Glasgow.

I delivered the van load of placards to Kennington Park in London for that demonstration. I parked up the van and got the tube to Trafalgar Square.

By that time, a riot had already started. The placard sticks were flying through the air like arrows at Agincourt and Police on horseback were charging into demonstrators. The demonstration had gotten congested outside Downing St, Thatcher’s official Prime Ministerial residence, and some people had sat down there. The police reacted with the utmost brutality in moving them on.

Witnessing this, I thought that they would drive the demo into Trafalgar Square and stop there. But emboldened by their victory in the Miners Strike of 1984-85 and in the printers dispute at Wapping in 1986 -87, the authorities thought they could teach us a lesson. They continued their attack into the square where thousands had been singing and chanting in a carnival atmosphere.

The police were absolutely brutal that day but the vast number of demonstrators fought back or supported those who did.

The then Apartheid-era South African Embassy is on the East Side of Trafalgar Square. It was being renovated and had scaffolding around it. Someone set the scaffolding alight and the Embassy began to burn. We knew then that this day was not going to be forgotten. All the pent up anger of working people, after our defeats in the Miners Strike, Wapping and the attempt to impose the Poll Tax was released. You could feel that day that Thatcher was on her way out.

The campaign continued after the riot. The authorities tried to drag the millions of non-payers to court and the protests and demonstrations continued. Many thousands of ordinary people represented themselves in court with the aid of a knowledgeable helper known in UK law as a ‘Mackenzie’s Friend.’

In Warrington, the Labour Council issued 5,500 summonses, hoping that only a few would turn up and the cases would be a formality. But around 1,000 besieged the court and magistrates abandoned proceedings.

News that the courts could be resisted spread and soon judges were adjourning hundreds of cases every week. The movement was winning the battle.

Thatcher was thrown into crisis, with her advisors fearing that the rebellion could spread into a more general confrontation. By August, senior government ministers were saying that both Thatcher and the poll tax would have to go.

In November, a tearful Margaret Thatcher emerged from Downing Street to announce her resignation.

Tactics in Berlin will be debated I’m sure, but as the fight against the Poll Tax showed, Cant’t Pay, Won’t Pay can be a powerful mobilising slogan and victories can be won.