Workers' Liberty

The Russian revolution was the most important event of the 20th century.

The murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich at the end of last year prompted some discussion about how to improve the lives and safety of sex workers. A 400 strong Reclaim the Night march was held in the city at which Teresa McKay, chair of the trades council, spoke. Here are some of the points of view that were written on this issue at the time.

Gilad Atzmon, the jazz musician who is prone to anti-semitic conspiracy theory rants played — not for the first time — for the Socialist Workers’ Party in December. The group’s invitation to Atzmon prompted a few words of protest by SWP apologist and children’s author Michael Rosen, writing as Isokotsky in the letters of page of Socialist Worker (7 January). Jazz fan Jim Denham has written this open letter to Atzmon.

By Amina Saddiq

Ken Livingstone’s wonderful world

Ken Livingstone, god bless ’im, is holding a conference on 20 January under the title “A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations”.

Defend Mark O’Reilly

STOP press: North/ Northwest London CWU branch has perpetrated a bureaucratic stitch-up against Mark O’Reilly, a postal worker at Finsbury Park depot. Mark decided to challenge the incumbent union rep who has colluded with management over job cuts for over two years. Mark distributed a leaflet to workmates that referred to high work levels over the last Xmas period and demanded to know what the rep had done to alleviate the burden on staff.

Shop steward and long-standing union activist Antony Czubkowski has been sacked by energy firm E.ON, in reaction to his complaint about being subjected to a verbal attack by his boss.

Antony has for the last 18 years been a leading Amicus activist, and in July 2006 convened a meeting for the five unions operating in E.ON. The manager, with a long record of anti-union and bullying behaviour, tried to sneak into the back of the meeting — Antony politely asked him to leave.

By Ann Mack

Jon Cruddas MP, the man who likes to style himself the union and grass roots friendly candidate for the post of Labour Party Deputy Leader, has called for the union vote at conference to be drastically cut.

By Jack Haslam

Two people were killed and up to 60 injured when a National Express coach crashed on a slip road linking the M4 and M25 last Wednesday night (January 3).

Our sympathies go out to the families and friends of the dead and injured.

By Chris Leary

The case of the severely disabled girl, known only as Ashley, who has undergone surgery to remove her womb and breasts, and will receive other treatments to keep her anatomically at a stage before puberty raised profound questions, not just for socialists, but for all people who care about human society. Those question — about consent, personal autonomy and medical interventions with profoundly disabled people — cannot be done justice within a single article. But some immediately stand out.

As we reported on the front page of the last Solidarity, the T&G’s Justice for Cleaners campaign, seeking to organise and mobilise cleaners working in the City of London, has won substantial gains. After several weeks of demonstrations and direct action, including a sit in at the offices of Goldman Sachs and the threat of a hunger strike by five workers to put pressure on the Royal Bank of Scotland, three major companies — ISS, Lancaster and Mite — have conceded the union's main demands. These include collective bargaining to determine a uniform system for the whole of the City of London and the “fare share” system by which non-members pay a contribution to union negotiating costs. The latter will help obviously extend and maintain union membership massively.

By Sacha Ismail based on a longer article by Wondimu Mekonnen, former lecturer at Addis Abba University and Ethiopian Teachers’ Association

On 14 December, Ethiopian Teachers’ Association (ETA) activist Ayalew was detained without a warrant by the Ethiopian government. Ayalew has reportedly been tortured and denied medical treatment while in police custody. His relatives and fellow ETA members are now extremely worried, as they have not known either his health condition nor his whereabouts since 18 December. Another activist, Mengistu, disappeared on 15 December.

By Gerry Bates

In the aftermath of the titantic struggle in Oaxaca last year, the repression of militants continues.

Narconews website reported at the end of December that three prominent leaders from the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) were kidnapped at gunpoint, taken to a private home, beaten and tortured and then dumped behind a shopping mall area after two hours.

By Mike Fenwick, Kate Ahrens and Nick Holden

The holiday season was used by the government to announce further redundancies and cuts. Redundancies in the Yorkshire Ambulance Service, delays in operations until the new financial year and more penny-pinching and potentially dangerous cost savings — such as reusing disposable clinical equipment, increasing the risk of infections.

By Dan Jakopovich

“The same conditions have governed the emergence of epidemics for thousands of years. Epidemics are preceeded by rapid population growth that tails into famine and malnutrition, urban crowding, poverty, and lack of sanitation and fresh water.” Susan Hunter, Who cares? AIDS in Africa1

By a civil servant

Two hundred and eighty thousand members of the civil service union PCS are being balloted for national strike action over job losses and pay. Activists in the PCS Socialist Caucus are working flat out to deliver the biggest possible "Yes", "Yes".

By a Tower Hamlets teaching assistant

Ruth Kelly’s government has been instrumental in closing down, wholesale, special schools in line with a policy called “inclusion”. The idea was that students with special needs would do better if included in mainstream schools.

Saddam Hussein was hanged in Baghdad on 30 December. The first thing that needs to be said about it, and said clearly and unambiguously, is that he should have been hanged a long time ago!

The second is that it is a great pity it was not the Iraqi workers, but the invaders and the Shia-dominated government of Iraq, that, 40 years too late, put a hangman’s rope around Saddam’s wretched neck.

We reprint here the founding statement of “Hands Off the People of Iran!”, a campaign currently in the process of being launched by a number of Iranian socialist groups and individuals in and around “Workers’ Left Unity”, as well as the CPGB/Weekly Worker group here.

By Martin Thomas

George W Bush's "new policy" in Iraq is a recipe for more bloodshed on the lines of the assault on Fallujah in November 2004 - but also, so it seems more and more, a botched compromise which makes no sense from any angle at all.

By Tom Unterrainer

The former education secretary and current “communities minister” Ruth Kelly has caused outrage amongst teachers, constituents and fellow Labour Party members by deciding to send her son to a £15,000 a year private school.

Debate: Amicus-TGWU merger: the creation of a fighting union?

Early in 2007, members of the TGWU and Amicus will ballot on proposed terms for a merger. The TGWU has approved the terms at a special delegate conference on 19 December 2006, and Amicus, in a postal ballot of its Executive. TGWU members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty believe we should vote in favour of that merger, a decision endorsed by the AWL’s national committee. Some comrades remained unconvinced and therefore we will continue to debate the terms of the merger. Below Peter Baker argues the case for the merger and Martin Thomas the case against.

By Paddy Dollard

NEIL Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humanity’s first extra-terrestrial baby-steps in July 1969, when they walked on the moon. Clumsy, uncertain, stumbling, there on the surface of the moon, they might have been mimicking the weary, clumsy, sometimes half-dead footsteps of the slave labourers who, at the end of World War Two, worked on the Nazi V2 rocket sites in France. And, in a sense, they were.