Friday, April 2

Arrive at the NUT Conference in Brighton expecting a lively and constructive weekend. Teachers are deeply angry about the Green Paper proposals for performance related pay.

Yet it is hard to think about anything but the unfolding crisis in Kosova. The previous week I had been to an involved discussion on the issue. This conflict is not reducible to the well-worn slogans - 'the main enemy is at home', 'stop the war', etc.

Members of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) have voted strongly for strike action over the government’s pension proposals, which could see the first national firefighters’ strike for a decade.

Come hither, lads, and hearken, for a tale there is to tell,
Of the wonderful days a-coming, when all shall be better than well.

And the tale shall be told of a country, a land in the midst of the sea,
And folk shall call it England in the days that are going to be.

There more than one in a thousand in the days that are yet to come
Shall have some hope of the morrow, some joy of the ancient home.

For then--laugh not, but listen to this strange tale of mine -
All folk that are in England shall be better lodged than swine.

The following resolution on Syria was passed by the AWL's National Committee on 31 August.

***

Assad's regime is the main problem, but we oppose the planned US bombing of Syria.

We will not mourn damage and destruction of Assad's military bases. However, informed military opinion is that there is no chance of a one-off operation, such as planned, seriously incapacitating Assad's regime; and in any case we do not want the victory of the opposition military forces, whose dominant character is reactionary and sectarian.

A year-long fight against blacklisting, victimisation, and union busting on a Crossrail construction site has ended with sacked union rep Frank Morris winning reinstatement, and contractor BFK recognising Unite on the site.

FOR THE COMMANDER OF "THE ELIZA"

". . . . the others, with emaciated faces and prominent, staring eyeballs, were evidently in an advanced state of starvation. The officer in charge reported the incident to Sir James Dombrain, the Inspector General . . . . . and Sir James "very inconveniently," wrote Routh, "interfered." Cecil Woodham-Smith: The Great Hunger."

FOR THE COMMANDER OF "THE ELIZA"

". . . . the others, with emaciated faces and prominent, staring eyeballs, were evidently in an advanced state of starvation. The officer in charge reported the incident to Sir James Dombrain, the Inspector General . . . . . and Sir James "very inconveniently," wrote Routh, "interfered." Cecil Woodham-Smith: The Great Hunger."

This speech was made by Max Shachtman soon after the famous March on Washington for civil rights of 28 August 1963, and appeared in New America, the paper of the Socialist Party (USA), on 24 September 1963.

It is not the Shachtman of the 1940s and early 50s, but the call for an alliance with the labour movement is interesting and valuable.

The superb demonstration for civil rights has come to its grandiose conclusion, as you know. And we of the Socialist Party are immensely proud and gratified over its spectacular triumph.

Problems of Trotskyist history: introduction to Shachtman's Where is the petty-bourgeois opposition?

George Santanyana’s aphorism, “Those who do not learn from history are likely to repeat it”, is not less true for having become a cliché. And those who do not know their own history cannot learn from it.

The text of Stalin’s report to the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is as yet available only in abridged form and there has not, at this writing, been enough time to give the report the detailed and thoroughgoing analysis it merits.

Even the condensed version, however, is important and clear enough for a number of preliminary observations, both with reference to what it omits as well as to what it contains.