Workers' Liberty

By Jill Mountford

David Freud’s a banker, a big banker and, it goes without saying, he’s very wealthy. So the Government (the Department of Work and Pensions) chose him to write an “independent” report on welfare reform, him being independent and all — entitled “Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity”.

By Stan Crooke

It is a sign of how debased the political “discussion” about immigration has become that Home Secretary John Reid can so proudly set out his plan to make life “constrained and uncomfortable” for illegal immigrants. He wants to stop them getting “housing, healthcare or work”. Put another way, he wants to make them homeless, ill (or perhaps dead) and unemployed. It is the kind of stuff that the BNP would welcome.

By THE No One Is Illegal campaign

For the first time an alliance of trade union General Secretaries have come together in support of a refugee in detention and under threat of deportation. The refugee is Alphonsus Uche Okafor-Mefor.

By Karen Johnson

The Coalition to Stop Deportations to Iraq was formed in early 2006 following the deportation of 15 Iraqi Kurdish asylum seekers back to Erbil Airport in Iraqi Kurdistan.

By Rhodri Evans

Despite its oil riches, Iran is a country of huge economic inequalities, huge corruption, 20% unemployment, and 12% inflation.

Teachers and other education workers last held mass protests in 2001, demanding equal pay with other state employees. Their action resulted in the drafting of a “Pay Parity Bill” which promised to lift salaries above the poverty level.

By Amina Saddiq

22 year old Egyptian blogger and former law student Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, or Kareem Amer as he is known online, was arrested by the authorities in Alexandria on 22 February and charged with the following offences:

By James McKinney

On 25 March 1807, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act was passed, which began to put an end to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Socialists should too should be celebrating this bicentenary because of the black slave resistance which accompanied the abolition and the opening it provided for the growth of mass working class campaigning in Britain.

Ian Paisley calls himself the “Leader of the Ulster People”. By that he means, leader of the Protestant-Unionist 56 per cent, or thereabouts, of the people living in the Six Counties. Now Paisley looks set to form a Six-County coalition government in partnership with Sinn Fein-IRA.

by Sacha Ismail

Toni Comer, the 19 year old woman whose beating by Sheffield police was captured on CCTV, says she remembers nothing about the night of the incident. But the cameras show her being hit, held down by four people, hit five more times and then pinned down with a foot on her body. Other officers arrived, with a police dog, and then she was dragged to their van with her trousers around her ankles.

By Sofie Buckland, NUS National Executive (personal capacity)

To most of its 5,200,000 paper members, the National Union of Students’ annual conference, which takes place on 27-29 March means nothing. Most will not even know that it is taking place. It means even less to ordinary NUS members than, say, Unison’s conference does to its rank-and-file members.

By Sacha Ismail

At the 11 March compositing meeting for this year’s NUS conference, the session to decide motions for the Students Rights and Welfare debate featured a very strange discussion about anti-semitism.

By Heather Shaw

The Director of the London School of Economics, Howard Davies, has announced a “significant increase in wages” amongst poorly paid staff at the college. This shift in policy comes after pressure from Living Wage campaigners.

By Nancy Davies

Students involved in the SAS week of action in February, which highlighted the struggles of Mexican workers in Oaxaca, will be interested to hear that the movement has begun to revive.

Steve Cohen begins an occasional series of appreciations of forgotten political novels, beginning with The Aerodrome by Rex Warner, published in 1942

All class-divided societies have inequality in education. Britain is not unique in that. What is unusual in Britain is the frenzy of the “postcode lottery” for favoured schools, now supplemented in Brighton by a literal lottery.

The question on Jim Denham’s voting paper, and on mine, in the recent TGWU-Amicus ballot, was “do you approve the Instrument of Amalgamation?”, not “are you, in general, in favour of a merger of TGWU and Amicus?”

To Tony Woodley, Joint General Secretary of TGWU-AMICUS

Dear Bro Woodley,

"Should [Labour] party policy be put into practice by [Labour] government, and if not, why not?", you asked in your article in the Guardian on 5 March.

Tom Unterrainer reviews “Ramparts of Resistance: Why workers lost their power and how to get it back” by Sheila Cohen

The great Spanish revolution of 1936-7, tragically betrayed and defeated, has gone down in history as “the Spanish Civil War” (1936-9). Civil war it surely was, but that designation, civil war, embodies the politics and the slant on history of those who crushed the workers’ revolution in Catalonia and elsewhere.

By a Central Trains driver

RMT rail union reps on Central Trains decided in the first week of March to “suspend” industrial action by guards over the company's new computerised rostering system, Crewplan.

by a tube worker

The RMT’s National Executive has decided to accept London Underground’s pay offer and not go ahead with strike action. But deal is well short of what we wanted and what staff deserve.

By Peter Burton

RMT signallers working for Network Rail in Scotland were due to hold two 48-hour strikes this month over the company's continued failure to implement a 35-hour week agreement signed last summer. The union looks like it has now come to an agreement with the company, and the strikes have been called off.

A thousand lecturers and students gathered at parliament at the end of February to lobby MPs over plans to restrict access to free English language courses.

Sally Hunt, the right-wing’s candidate for the post of UCU general secretary, has been elected on 52% of the vote. Hunt defeated Roger Kline, the candidate backed by most the of the left.

By a Probation Service Unison activist

WITH privatisation legislation now heading for the House of Lords, the probation unions Napo and Unison need to urgently organise for joint action to stop the rot. We’ve got an uphill task.

By Chris Leary

WORKERS at the Burslem sorting office in Staffordshire are in the process of balloting for further strike action against the sacking of a long standing worker after a previous strike.

By Mike Fenwick, leeds health unison and leeds keep our nhs public

GORDON Brown will impose a below inflation pay award on the public sector this year. The armed services are exempt but all those working in the NHS, civil service etc will have an effective cut in salary.

Saturday 3 March saw the first nationally coordinated day of action in defence of the NHS for nearly twenty years, organised by the TUC led NHS Together group of unions and professional organisations.

by robin sivapalan

THE North London Workers’ Liberty forum “What next in Somalia after military intervention?” on 22 February was attended by about 70 people, including many Somalis living locally in Wembley.