A packed meeting yesterday saw Class War groups from London,Leeds,Halifax,Bristol,Hereford,Norwich,Cambridge, Brighton and Southampton plus individuals from Freedom Press,Liberty and Solidarity,IWW,Anarchist Federation,Antifa,Camden anarchists,Croydon anarchists and Whitechapel Anarchists come together to discuss a General Election Campaign. A unanimous YES was given to the idea of a consistent and coherent anarchist intervention which will begin on March 20th with a march on Goldsmith’s house, followed by a rally on March 31st in Trafalgar Square to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Poll Tax riot and ask the question ‘Which is more effective – the Ballot Box or Direct Action’. A whole number of other surprises and interventions are planned and in the month of the actual election campaign the ANARCHIST WAR CABINET will meet twice weekly to plan actions and then daily for the last week till May6th. Freedom Bookshop will act as the hub for information coming in and out at short notice. This promises to be an exciting couple of months and a follow up meeting is scheduled for February 28th. C’mon comrades – shake a fucking leg!

We have recently (Sunday) discovered a MAJOR fuck-up on our post box.

Knowing that some of you have ordered and are eagerly awaiting their new stuff… we are working around the clock to try and sort this.

We’re afraid the fuckup started in October, so some of you might already be very frustrated… We do apologise.

Orders on the way, please give us a fortnight. If you no longer want the stuff, please email londoncwf@yahoo,co.ok. If you’ve grown out of it… we have all sizes and if we ran out of stock, please advice us as to how to refund you…something else, papers, badges, all but a drop to the knees…

WE ARE WORKING TO SORT THIS OUT ASAP. So sorry for any inconvenience.

Cheers

Class War!!

The Big Freeze continues to cause chaos to the daily lives of the working class in Brittain. At least 22 people have died in incidents related to the weather. Thousands of homes have been left without power, schools have closed across the country and travellers face devastation with delays on bus, train and flight services.

The demands on A&E are growing, as fearful idiots try to make their way to work, or get their kids to sit their exams.

And amongst all t his chaos, guess who picks up the bill....WE DO.

Government offices cover their arses, stating that we should: “ONLY TRAVEL IF YOU HAVE TO”...In the same breath, they announced that those who do not make it into work will lose wages or face disciplinary charges. Children and young people who do not get to sit their exams will not be granted another opportunity before June, when the next round of exams are scheduled, gas companies are running out of supply and despite all the “Health and Safety” – cover your own arse warnings, they announced today that all Local Authorities should reduce salt gritting by 1 third as the UK is running out.

As usual, the ruling class are making us suffer, holding us to account – even if it is the weather – and there are we, shouting about Climate Change. What a fucking joke.

Obvious line but...

This neo fascist sectarian already holds the title of throwback bigot of the decade for comparing same sex relationships to paedophilia after a gay man was nearly killed in a homophobic attack

But clearly shagging a spotty child, 49 years (so she was 49 when he was a born and not a paedophile?) your junior is ok...............................

And then saying he was like the “son she never had” (clearly, no child of hers would be safe) do all bigots think fucking children is ok, as long as they’re your own?

Well thank fuck for that he’d have grown up a sexually abused freak, but then clearly joined the Unionists so probably fitted in

And conning £50k for him, fixing a planning committee, but need I go on?

Never forget this is the “no Surrender” party, who presumably hoped their mates “fart in a jar” declaration of putting weapons beyond use (sic) would disabuse us of the fact that:

Indeed,

Politicians Wankers

Bigots? Well it’s a shame she’s as shit at suicide as she is at sexual boundaries, early grave to you all.

Labour party faithful as a dog on heat shock

Well, much as sticking large knives in Gordies back seems like something to while away the time while you’re snowed in, no great surprise that the Queen pretender (and the Goon), is a profiteer and paid consultant for 2 companies that will make billions if the Tories do get in and privatise what’s left of our NHS, whilst Brown deserves little quarter it’s more telling that key labour pretenders are very ready to slaughter their own for a few dollars more

As if you need reminding

Politicians?

Wankers

Britain now has the longest work hours in the developed world after the US

We spent one third of our life at work. Today, very few of us work in factories, yet we cling to our old working class habits:
Clock in,
Sit in your terminal,
Be seen to work,
Clock out.

Is this the best way to achieve our maximum potential or is this the CAPITALIST STATE grinding us to a halt?

Should we, the working class, have more autonomy in the way we work???.

Being forced into a snowbound, work from home, privilege for the past 4 days, I realised that my productivity was higher, I worked faster and had fewer distractions and actually felt happier. In a wired lap-topped world, far more people could work more effectively from home, in hours of their own choosing, if only their bosses would have confidence in them. They would be better workers, better parents and better people – and we would take a huge number of cars off the road.

Maslow’s hierarchy of need would suggest that now that most of us have achieved food, clothes, heat and toys, we could relax and work less, instead, the treadmill is whirling ever-faster.

This isn't our choice: The working class say they want to work less and spend more time with their friends, their families and their thoughts. We know all work and no play is bad for us. Working consistently for more than 45 hours a week will damage your physical, emotional and psychological health. Yet 1 in 6 of working class Brits is 37 per cent more likely to suffer a stroke or heart-attack because we work 60 hours a week.

We don't stop primarily because CAPITALISM has locked us in an arms race with our fellow workers. If we relax and become more human, we fall behind the person on the next desk, who maybe working faster.

In the 1990s, the French insisted that everyone work a maximum of 35 paid hours a week. It was a way of saying: in a rich country, life is about more than serving corporations and slogging. WEALTH GENERATION AND CONSUMERISM SHOULD BE OUR SLAVES, NOT OUR MASTERS: where they make us happy, we should embrace them; where they make us miserable, we should cast them aside. Enjoy yourself. True wealth lies not only in having enough, but in having the time to enjoy everything and everyone around you.

Lets unite on this, a 4 day week, more time to overthrow the Capitalist state that imprison and murder us! I maybe being a bit biased as I’m not normally a reformist and I do work for the council, but sounds a simple and easy to work action, maybe we should encourage our bosses to think about it they’re probably too fixated and stupid, but, 20% less heating of buildings, driving to work and all that jazz!

As the G20 mobilisation brought upwards of 8,000-10,000 people onto the streets against the financial crisis, a broad coalition is shaping up aiming to vent a lot of the frustrations and anger that exists at the "democratic process" of rubber stamping the rule of capitalism over our society. This invite is open to all who want to contribute or work with others in a expressing this dissent. Already there are talks of a Climate Camp intervention, Class War action, all the way to local community initiatives. As the tories await their next turn to whip the proles arses for the next 5 years, maybe its time to bring back the notion that we are not just passive consumers waiting for the next big bonanza sales but active agents in our lives with the anger and vitriol for a ruck against this dead system.


**Warning: Some people at this meeting you may not agree with, get over it!**


ELECTION MOBILISATION MEETING


You are cordially invited to attend..


An open-ended meeting, arranged so people can consider how a
coalition of groups and tendencies might mobilise together in 2010, for
a new society. It's suggested this should be in the context of the
general election, and on the strategy for an effective, decentralised
movement in response, but the agenda is not fixed. All groups and
individuals committed to a world free of oppression, very welcome.



And please forward this invitation.


Meeting Dates: Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st January
Venue: Downstairs at The Foundry, Old Street tube, 80 Great Eastern Street, London, EC2A 3JLý
Time: 3-7pm (both days)


From the people that had the balls to mobilise for G20.

By MARK RUDD
Since the summer of 2003, I've crisscrossed the country speaking at colleges and theaters and bookstores, first with The Weather Underground documentary and, starting in March of this year, with my book, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow, 2009). In discussions with young people, they often tell me, “Nothing anyone does can ever make a difference.”

The words still sound strange: it's a phrase I never once heard forty years ago, a sentiment obviously false on its surface. Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, I – and the rest of the country – knew about the civil rights movement in the South, and what was most evident was that individuals, joining with others, actually were making a difference. The labor movement of the Thirties to the Sixties had improved the lives of millions; the anti-war movement had brought down a sitting president – LBJ, March 1968 – and was actively engaged in stopping the Vietnam War. In the forty years since, the women's movement, gay rights, disability rights, animal rights, and environmental movements have all registered enormous social and political gains. To old new lefties, such as myself, this is all self-evident.


SO, WHY THE DEFEATISM? In the absence of knowledge of how these historical movements were built, young people assume that they arose spontaneously, or, perhaps, charismatic leaders suddenly called them into existence. On the third Monday of every January we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. having had a dream; knowledge of the movement itself is lost.

The current anti-war movement's weakness, however, is very much alive in young people's experience. They cite the fact that millions turned out in the streets in the early spring of 2003 to oppose the pending U.S. attack on Iraq, but that these demonstrations had no effect. “We demonstrated, and they didn't listen to us.” Even the activists among them became demoralized as numbers at demonstrations dropped off very quickly, street demonstrations becoming cliches, and, despite a big shift in public opinion in 2006, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan droned on to today. The very success of the spontaneous early mobilization seems to have contributed to the anti-war movement's long-term weakness.

Something's missing. I first got an insight into articulating what it is when I picked up Letters from Young Activists: Today's Rebels Speak Out, edited by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin and Kenyon Farrow (Nation Books, 2005). Andy Cornell, in a letter to the movement that first radicalized him, “Dear Punk Rock Activism,” criticizes the conflation of the terms “activism” and “organizing.” He writes, “activists are individuals who dedicate their time and energy to various efforts they hope will contribute to social, political, or economic change. Organizers are activists who, in addition to their own participation, work to move other people to take action and help them develop skills, political analysis and confidence within the context of organizations. Organizing is a process – creating long-term campaigns that mobilize a certain constituency to press for specific demands from a particular target, using a defined strategy and escalating tactics.” In other words, it's not enough for punks to continually express their contempt for mainstream values through their alternate identity; they've got to move toward “organizing masses of people.”

AHA! ACTIVISM = SELF-EXPRESSION; ORGANIZING = MOVEMENT-BUILDING.

Until recently, I'd rarely heard young people call themselves “organizers.” The common term for years has been “activists.” Organizing was reduced to the behind the scenes nuts-and-bolts work needed to pull off a specific event, such as a concert or demonstration. But forty years ago, we only used the word “activist” to mock our enemies' view of us, as when a university administrator or newspaper editorial writer would call us “mindless activists.” We were organizers, our work was building a mass movement, and that took constant discussion of goals, strategy and tactics (and, later, contributing to our downfall ideology).

Thinking back over my own experience, I realized that I had inherited this organizer's identity from the red diaper babies I fell in with at the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. Raised by parents in the labor and civil rights and communist or socialist movements, they had naturally learned the organizing method as other kids learned how to throw footballs or bake pineapple upside-down cakes. “Build the base!” was the constant strategy of Columbia SDS for years.

Yet, young activists I met were surprised to learn that major events, such as the Columbia rebellion of April 1968, did not happen spontaneously, that they took years of prior education, relationship building, reconsideration on the part of individuals of their role in the institution. I.e., organizing. It seemed to me that they believed that movements happen as a sort of dramatic or spectator sport: after a small group of people express themselves, large numbers of bystanders see the truth in what they're saying and join in. The mass anti-war mobilization of the Spring 2003, which failed to stop the war, was the only model they knew.


I began looking for a literature that would show how successful historical movements were built. Not the outcomes or triumphs, such as the great civil rights March on Washington in 1963, but the many streams that eventually created the floods. I wanted to know who said what to whom and how did they respond. One book was recommended to me repeatedly by friends, I've Got the Light of Freedom: the Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne (University of California Press, 1995). Payne, an African-American sociologist, now at the University of Chicago, asked the question how young student organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, had successfully organized voter registration and related campaigns in one town, Greenwood, Mississippi, in the years 1961-1964. The Mississippi Delta region was one of the most benighted areas of the South, with conditions for black cotton sharecroppers and plantation workers not much above the level of slavery. Despite the fact that illiteracy and economic dependency were the norm among black people in the Delta, and that they were the target of years of violent terror tactics, including murder, SNCC miraculously organized these same people to take the steps toward their own freedom, through attaining voting rights and education. How did they do it?

What Payne uncovers through his investigation into SNCC in Greenwood is an organizing method that has no name but is solidly rooted in the traditions of church women of the rural South. Black churches usually had charismatic male ministers, who, as a consequence of their positions, led in an authoritarian manner. The work of the congregations themselves, however, the social events and education and mutual aid were organized at the base level by women, who were democratic and relational in style. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Council, SCLC, used the ministerial model in their mobilizing for events, while the young people of SNCC – informed by the teaching and examples of freedom movement veterans Ella Baker and Septima Clark – concentrated on building relationships with local people and helping them develop into leaders within democratic structures. SNCC's central organizing principle,” participatory democracy,” was a direct inheritance from Ella Baker.

Payne writes, “SNCC preached a gospel of individual efficacy. What you do matters. In order to move politically, people had to believe that. In Greenwood, the movement was able to exploit communal and familial traditions that encouraged people to believe in their own light.”

The features of the method, sometimes called “developmental” or “transformational organizing,” involve long-term strategy, patient base-building, personal engagement between people, full democratic participation, education and the development of people’s leadership capabilities, and coalition-building. The developmental method is often juxtaposed to Alinsky-style organizing, which is usually characterized as top-down and manipulative.

For a first-hand view of Alinsky organizing – though it’s never named as such – by a trained and seasoned practitioner, see Barack Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father (Three Rivers Press, 1995 and 2004). In the middle section of the book, “Chicago,” Obama describes his three years organizing on the streets and housing projects of South Chicago. He beautifully invokes his motives – improving young people's lives – but at the same time draws a murky picture of organizing. Questions abound: Who trained him? What was his training? Who paid him? What is the guiding ideology? What is his relationship to the people he calls “my leaders?” Are they above him or are they manipulated by him? Who are calling whose shots? What are the long-term consequences? It's a great piece to start a discussion with young organizers.


While reading I've Got the Light of Freedom, I realized that much of what we had practiced in SDS was derived from SNCC and this developmental organizing tradition, up to and including the vision of “participatory democracy,” which was incorporated in the 1962 SDS founding document, “The Port Huron Statement.» Columbia SDS's work was patient, strategic, base-building, using both confrontation and education. I, myself, had been nurtured and developed into a leadership position through years of close friendship with older organizers.


However, my clique's downfall came post-1968, when, under the spell of the illusion of revolution, we abandoned organizing, first for militant confrontation (Weatherman and the Days of Rage, Oct. 1969) and then armed urban guerilla warfare (the Weather Underground, 1970-1976). We had, in effect, moved backward from organizing to self-expression, believing, ridiculously, that that would build the movement. At the moment when more organizing was needed to build a permanent anti-imperialist mass movement, we abandoned organizing.


This is the story I tell in my book, Underground. It's about good organizing (Columbia), leading to worse (Weatherman), leading to horrible (the Weather Underground). I hope it's useful to contemporary organizers, as they contemplate how to build the coming mass movement(s).

Mark Rudd lives and teaches in Albuquerque, N.M. He can be reached at www.markrudd.com.

The Guardian, Friday 8 January 2010

This is a big year for feminist anniversaries. It was 40 years ago that the first ever National Women's Liberation conference was held in the UK, that Germaine Greer published her groundbreaking book The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett published the life-changing work Sexual Politics. The year looks set to include a whole host of celebrations then, one of which is already underway – the Ms Understood exhibition at the Women's Library in London, which traces "the sisterhood and spirit of 1970s feminism" and runs until the end of March.

But this year's feminist calendar isn't solely historical. Three major new feminist books are to be published in Britain, the TV series Mad Men continues to explore the sexual politics of the 1960s, there's an awesomely girl-centric directorial debut from Drew Barrymore, as well as the much-heralded film Precious. Without any more ado then, here's our round-up of the books, films, TV and events that will have us all talking in the next few months.

FILM

PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE (29 JANUARY)
The story of an overweight, illiterate teenager in 1980s Harlem, pregnant by her abusive father for the second time. The primarily female cast – Gabourey Sidibe, Mariah Carey, Paula Patton and Mo'Nique – has come in for fulsome praise, with Sidibe's performance as Precious, and Mo'Nique's turn as her abusive mother, being talked of as Oscar possibilities. A must-see.

PONYO (12 FEBRUARY)
One for fledgling feminists, this is the award-winning Japanese animated film about a fish-girl who swims away from her father's underwater castle in search of enormous adventures. The voice cast includes the brilliant Cate Blanchett, Tina Fey and Lily Tomlin.

WHIP IT (APRIL)
Drew Barrymore's directorial debut features Ellen Page (Juno) as a young woman who escapes the world of beauty pageants to find fun, friendship – and, of course, herself – in the rough and tumble of roller derby. The film also features the uber-feminist Juliette Lewis returning to acting after a few years on the road with her punk band, along with Eve, Marcia Gay Harden, Kristen Wiig, Zoe Bell and Barrymore herself. A great film for teenage punk-feminists.

OTHERS TO WATCH OUT FOR: Tina Fey stars in screwball comedy Date Night in April; Philip Noyce's Salt stars Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent on the run in August.

BOOKS

NATASHA WALTER, LIVING DOLLS: THE RETURN OF SEXISM (4 FEBRUARY, VIRAGO)
The cover of the much-anticipated new book from Walter depicts a Barbie doll shoved into a woman's groin. "While the opportunities available to women may have expanded," writes Walter, "the ambitions of many young girls are, in reality, limited by a culture that asks them to see consumerism and self-decoration as their only proper occupations, and their bodies as their only passport to success." A must-read.

MARTIN AMIS, THE PREGNANT WIDOW (4 FEBRUARY, JONATHAN CAPE)
Brace yourself for a furore as Amis takes on sexual politics. It is set in 1970: "The girls are acting like boys, the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing – 20 years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel – is struggling to twist feminism and women's ascendancy toward his own ends." Amis suspects the book will get him into trouble with feminists, although he insists he is a "gynocrat" (someone who wants to be ruled by women). "It's a very feminist book," he has said. "They haven't got a case . . . It's astonishingly difficult to find a decent deal between men and women and we haven't found it yet."

KAT BANYARD, THE EQUALITY ILLUSION: THE TRUTH ABOUT MEN AND WOMEN TODAY (4 MARCH, FABER AND FABER)
Banyard, campaigns officer at the equality organisation the Fawcett Society, writes that "Feminism is one of the most important social-justice movements of our age", before exposing some uncomfortable facts. "Women working in the UK earn on average 23% less than men," she writes. "The conviction rate for rape is 6.5%. During the 1990s the number of men paying for sex acts doubled." The book ends with a chapter on activism, with ideas for grassroots campaigning.

CATHERINE REDFERN AND KRISTIN AUNE, RECLAIMING THE F WORD: THE NEW FEMINIST MOVEMENT (8 JUNE, ZED BOOKS)
This promises to debunk the idea that the fight for women's rights has dried up, to profile the new generation of activists, and unleash a "fresh and diverse wave of feminism". Bring it on!

OTHERS TO WATCH OUT FOR: In the US, the brilliant young feminist writer, Rebecca Traister publishes Big Girls Don't Cry: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama and the Year that Changed Everything (14 September, Free Press); Amanda Marcotte publishes Get Opinionated: A Progressive's Guide to Finding Your Voice (and Taking A Little Action) (April, Seal Press); and Courtney E Martin and J Courtney Sullivan publish Click: Young Women on the Moments They Knew They Were Feminists (May, Seal Press).

In women's fiction, there's the announcement of the Orange Prize longlist in March and the shortlist in April. The book critic Alex Clark says that her top picks by women writers for the coming year so far are: The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna; Trespass by Rose Tremain; The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna; The Lessons by Naomi Alderman; The Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker; The News Where You Are by Catherine O'Flynn. Look out for two possible Booker contenders for next autumn: The Long Song by Andrea Levy (February, Headline Review) and Isa & May by Margaret Forster (February, Chatto & Windus). And if all that wasn't enough, there's the upcoming book event The Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston (28 January, The Women's Library, London), when Bonnie Greer and Bernardine Evaristo will be celebrating the work of the fabulous author of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

TELEVISION

MAD MEN, BBC FOUR
The third series of Mad Men airs early this year, and it's still the best show on TV when it comes to exploring gender relations. Betty's ambivalence towards motherhood continues as she gives birth to her third child; Peggy branches out into pleated skirts – and a relationship with an older man with no strings attached; and, thank God, Joan gets her physical revenge on the rapist she married.

LIP SERVICE, BBC THREE
This six-part drama series about the sex lives of twentysomething lesbians in Glasgow could prove to be even more daring than cult US series The L Word. Writer Harriet Braun describes it as a "sexy, funny and irreverent drama that reflects what it is to be a young gay woman living in Britain today".

THEATRE

TRILOGY BY NIC GREEN (BATTERSEA ARTS CENTRE, 12-16 JANUARY, THEN ON TOUR)
Described as "a celebratory venture into modern-day feminism", Part One culminates in an ensemble choreography piece featuring up to 100 female volunteers, all naked. "It feels like young women don't want to say they're feminist in case boys and men don't like them," says experimental playwright Green. "I'd like it to be celebrated in a way that means we might all be happier."

ART
THE RISE OF WOMEN ARTISTS EXHIBITION, WALKER ART GALLERY, LIVERPOOL (CONTINUES UNTIL 14 MARCH)
This free exhibition includes work by Paula Rego, Helen Chadwick, Louise Bourgeois and Alison Britton, charting the progress of women artists from the 16th century to the present day and posing the question, "Does the gender of an artist matter – and should artists be labelled?" It includes a series of drop-in events in the coming months.

THE 2010 WHITNEY BIENNIAL, THE WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK (25 FEBRUARY TO 30 MAY)
Jerry Saltz, senior art critic for New York magazine, has already blogged about his amazement and delight that, of all the artists featured in this year's influential Whitney Biennial, an unprecedented 52% are women. The curator Francesco Bonami says that they "didn't look for women artists. They were just in front of our eyes. It wasn't conscious at all." Expect to hear about work by Kate Gilmore, who is "known to smash through Sheetrock walls while wearing party dresses and high heels".

ELLES@CENTREPOMPIDOU, CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS (UNTIL 24 MAY)
This exhibition features 500 works by more than 200 women artists, including Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Sophie Calle, Annette Messager and Louise Bourgeois.

EVENTS
FAWCETT SOCIETY FIREWALK FOR FEMINISM (4 FEBRUARY, LONDON)
After a training session with firewalking team Survivorbility, volunteers will be skipping across hot coals to raise sponsorship funds for the Fawcett Society. Celebrity supporters include Ken Livingstone and Oona King, and Tipping the Velvet author Sarah Waters has pledged that she will do the actual firewalk. Waters says: "Feminism is part of a wider struggle against all inequalities. Surely the real question should be, not 'Why are you a feminist?' but 'Why aren't you one?'"

BRISTOL RECLAIM THE NIGHT MARCH (26 FEBRUARY)
Organised by Bristol Feminist Network, this celebrates four decades of Reclaim the Night marches and is intended to serve as "a great, big, public reminder that everyone has a right to experience the city free from fear, whatever the time of day and whatever their gender."

MILLION WOMEN RISE: THE MARCH (6 MARCH, LONDON)
Starting at Hyde Park Corner at noon and ending in a rally at Trafalgar Square at 3pm, this is an all-female demonstration aimed at showing politicians that not enough is being done to protect women from violence

“ THE MAJORITY OF CLERGY DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT EMPLOYMENT STATUS ” says Rev John Packer, Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, they are employed by GOD,

Unite Union today released a statement that is lobbying for the government to change the law to give priests greater protection

UNITE has set up a hotline where the clergy can report abuse, and says it deals with up to 150 cases a year. "They're picked on for everything they do wrong, so in the end the person runs around terrified. You see these people unsupported, driven into depression and a nervous breakdown."

'Campaign of hate'

Mr Barlow said: "Bishops can treat people shamefully. The most common experience is a priest gets called in for a pastoral chat, to 'see how things are going', within half an hour he's telling you he's going to fire you or take your licence away".

Parishioners can also carry out the bullying, according to Unite, citing the case of a priest in rural Worcestershire who claims he was driven out by a campaign of hate.

When Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams was asked about the issue of bullying at a recent TUC conference, he admitted there was a problem.

"The question of bullying, I'm glad you raise it because I think that's unfinished business for us and I'm very glad that it's flagged up," he said.

The union says priests are vulnerable, because they are classed as self-employed office holders, which means they are exempt from the protection offered by employment law. This means they cannot claim unfair dismissal, or seek protection under health and safety laws.

“So what can they do?”

GO ON STRIKE !!!