Relaunch teachers' workload fight

The teachers’ dispute on workload, currently being run jointly with a campaign on pay and pensions, needs relaunching on a wholly new basis.

If NUT and NASUWT are serious about using school-based action to frustrate Gove's reforms, win real gains for teachers across the board and build strength and confidence for the national strike action then some basics would need to be put in place:

• Encourage the building of joint action committees in every school

• Publicise every dispute and pour resources into winning

Ralph Miliband and Israel-Palestine

Ed Miliband’s father Ralph Miliband, a Marxist writer denounced by the Daily Mail as “the man who hated Britain”, left behind him two well-known books, Parliamentary Socialism and The State In Capitalist Society.

Less-known, but also valuable today, is a thin volume of letters in 1967 about Israel-Palestine between Ralph Miliband and his friend Marcel Liebman, who was then a contributor to the semi-Trotskyist Belgian weekly La Gauche.

Greek university workers' five week strike

After closing the state broadcaster ERT, laying off thousands of workers, putting the padlock in hospitals and other public services, the Greek government now plans to sack about 1,700 university administrators.

The government faces a budget gap in higher education. They want to find a 33% cut and have decided workers must pay. The workers will all be sacked if they cannot first be redeployed (which, given the extent of the cuts, looks unlikely).

Open Europe's borders!

“The risk of illegal border-crossing across the Central Mediterranean area was assessed as amongst the highest, due to the continued volatile situation in countries of departure in North Africa.”

That’s how the latest annual report by Frontex — the European Union’s border agency — assessed the risk of attempting to enter the European Union by sailing from North Africa to Italian territories.

But when Frontex talked about “risk”, it did not mean the risk to migrants themselves. It meant the “risk” to the security of the borders of the European Union.

The boat people of the 1940's

What the Somali and other refugees drowned in the Mediterranean are now, Jews were in the 1940s.

A British government White Paper published in May of 1939 restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine to 75,000 for the following five years. It would then cease completely unless the Arabs in the independent Palestine envisaged by the White Paper agreed to further Jewish immigration.

Who will speak for the worst-off?

Just don’t get any ideas! That is the message from Labour’s new people appointed to front-bench positions.

Rachel Reeves, the new work and pensions front-bencher, who in another life spouted about “challenging neo-liberalism”, told the Observer that on welfare benefits:

“We would be tougher [than the Conservatives]. If they [unemployed people] don’t take it [the offer of a job] they will forfeit their benefit”.

Debating the Israel-Palestine conflict

On Sunday 13 October, Independent Jewish Voices held a conference in London on the ongoing impasse in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

IJV was set up in 2007 as an organisation of left-wing British Jews opposed to the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. It conceives of itself as a “counter-balance” to the official communal leadership of the conservative and staunchly Zionist Board of Deputies.

Unions should coordinate strike flurry

Teachers struck on 17 October in a well-supported action

On Wednesday 16 October, the Royal Mail workers’ ballot for strikes over pay and conditions, in the context of postal service privatisation, will be returned. The Communication Workers Union (CWU) strongly expects that it will return a yes vote; any strike would be the first national postal workers’ strike since 2009. The CWU are expected to begin with an all-out national strike, followed by rolling action in the run up to Christmas.

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.