Workers' Liberty

Equal rights for all!

Dear Mr Murphy O’Connor,

Courage in “Defence of the Faith” is, I suppose, a requirement of your office. Even so, I find it hard not to admire your courage — or bare-faced cheek — in attempting to “lay down the law” to the British government and the people it governs on what legal rights gay people in the UK should have and what legal rights granted to others should be denied them.

There are plenty of blogs out there which give a left wing analysis of news and current affairs — or, at least, try to — so Pete’s Radical Poetry Site is a refeshing change. Run by Scottish socialist Pete Burton, the site aims to gather together radical and anti-establishment culture, from poetry to music to prose, in one handy place.

Sofie Buckland reviews Babel

The latest effort from Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, is over two-and-a-half hours of intense misery. Which would be fine, had Iñárritu not made it such hard work to empathise with a single one of his characters. A tale of emotional heartache centred around miscommunication (hence the title), the film drips with anguished expressions, heavy music and lingering shots of the desolate landscapes it’s set in, but somehow still manages to come across as very cold.

I’d like to reply to Chris Leary’s article about Ashley X the severely disabled child who underwent radical medical intervention to keep body childlike (Solidarity 3-104).

The issue here is the violation of an individual; the denial of basic human rights to a human being. I disagree strongly with the use of the word “treatment” to describe what was done to Ashley — the procedure was not performed to “treat” an ailment but rather alter her state of being — to keep her small for the rest of her life.

By Mike Rowley

The extent of the pressure put on the Serious Fraud Office by Tony Blair’s government to drop its investigation last year into British Aerospace’s alleged systematic bribery of Saudi Arabian officials has finally come to light.

By a health worker

Two hundred people from trade unions and community campaigns attended the second national conference of Keep Our NHS Public on 19 January. But apart from Amicus’s Gill George there were not official representatives of the trade unions present.

Striking for jobs and pay
By a civil servant

Members of the civil service union PCS have voted to strike (61% in favour) on 31 January over jobs cuts and pay. The government, having already cut thousands of jobs in the Department of Work and Pensions, is still set to cut many thousands more. An overtime ban will follow the action on the 31st. In addition PCS members in Revenue and Customs are now balloting over a “work to rule”.

By Pablo Velasco

Venezuela

Recently Hugo Chávez declared the nationalisation of telecom and electricity firms. Now the Venezuelan government has announced that this would not be the expropriation of capital without compensation. According to Steven Mather, writing on the Venezuelanalysis website: “The Finance Chairman of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Ricardo Sanguino, said… that his government would compensate those companies that are to lose out over the nationalisation plans of his government.”

The struggle in Oaxaca Mexico was one of high points of workers’ struggle anywhere in the world last year. Now the movement of teachers and others in APPO is facing savage repression.

The latest Mexican Labor News and Analysis reports on the findings of the Mexican National Commission for Human Rights which issued a preliminary report on 18 December, in which it concluded that 20 people had been killed, 370 injured and 349 imprisoned since 2 June 2006. The commission organised a delegation of trade unionists and lawyers to Oaxaca. They were told that many have disappeared or are in hiding. The Commission received 1,211 complaints about alleged violations of human rights — the “improper use of the police forces, arbitrary detentions, people held incommunicado, disappearances, damage, injuries, threats and illegal raids”.

By Anne Mack

British Airways cabin crew are set to strike for three days from Monday 29 January, after 96% of TGWU members voted for industrial action over pay, pensions and sick leave.

On 15 January over a thousand stewards and stewardesses gathered at a Heathrow hotel to hear the ballot result. Jack Dromey, Deputy General Secretary of the TGWU, told the meeting that “defeat was unthinkable” adding, “That would give the management the upper hand for a generation.”

By Jack Haslam

The Hayden Philips inquiry into party funding may not now be proposing drastic cuts to trade union funding of the Labour Party. The idea of putting a £50,000 cap on donations and affiliations looks to have been shelved. According to reports a new deal will be based on voluntary self-regulation of party finances.

By Gerry Bates

Under the Corporate Manslaughter Bill, currently going through the House of Lords, large dangerous organisations that kill will continue to escape prosecution. That is the legal opinion of lawyers working for the Centre for Corporate Accountability.

Prostitution and prejudice

Steve Cohen looks at the suprising history in Prostitution and Prejudice, The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery 1870-1939 by Edward Bristow, (Clarendon Press)

The issue of sex work has recently been dominant in both the popular press and also in feminist and left circles. One reason for this was the murder of five women in Ipswich. Another is because of government legislation introduced to outlaw trafficking generally and trafficking for sexual exploitation in particular.

Together with Karl Liebnecht and — a little later Leo Jogiches — Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by right wing reactionaries in January 1919, after the failure of the rising by the Spartacists, the young, small, newly-formed Communist Party of Germany. She had spent the years of the First World War mainly in jail.

By Yasmine Mather, Workers Left Unity Iran

Over the last few weeks, as the Islamic regime in Iran tried to come to terms with the consequences of the sanctions imposed on 23 December 2006, and as the country prepared for more severe sanctions called for by the US, Iran’s supreme clerical leader Ayatollah Khamnei has tried to intervene directly in negotiations on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme and its relations with the US.

By Paolo Ramazini

Oil giant BP might see itself as “beyond petroleum” but the only things it is beyond are safety laws and basic justice. The company is another high profile case of a corporate killer getting away with murder while its bosses pocket millions and remain untouched by laws supposed to hold them to account.

It's the lower end of the call-centre industry I'm working in, here in Brisbane. It's in the lower half of the industry – outbound, rather than the comparatively aristocratic inbound call-centres – and it's a small, low-tech operation within that lower half.