Workers' Liberty

By Sacha Ismail

When it’s not busy attacking public sector workers’ miserable pensions as overly generous and telling us how easy life is for asylum-seekers, the favourite pastime of the foul Daily Express is bashing Britain’s Muslim population.

By Pat Murphy

All the main public-sector unions have now taken some sort of position in favour of united industrial action to force pay rises at least matching inflation and to break the two per cent limit decreed by Gordon Brown for both 2007-8 and 2008-9.

The question now is, who will take the initiative to turn this talk into action?

By Stan Crooke

"I was brought up as a Labour voter and it was euphoric when they got into power. I didn't realise it wasn't New Labour at all — it was the Tories dressed in red." — Noel Gallagher, of Oasis.

Tony Blair has announced he will resign as Labour Party leader on 10 May. All hopes that the end of Blair will mean an end to Blairism — i.e. to Thatcherism dressed up in Labour clothing — or, at least, that there will be a chance openly to register labour-movement opposition to Blair-Brownism in the coming leadership contest, depend on John McDonnell.

Sheila Cohen responds to two reviews, by Tom Unterrainer and Martin Thomas, of her book on trade unionism, Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost Their Power, and How to Get It Back (Pluto Press, 2006)

For Tom Unterrainer, click here
For Martin Thomas, click here

By Becky Crocker

There are an estimated 500,000 migrants living in the UK “without papers” Evidence of the intimidation and exploitation they face as a result of being denied the right to work is constantly coming to light.

By Chris Ford

On 27 April a wildcat strike broke out in Musgrave warehouses in Dublin. The whole crew, around 80 people, both immigrant and natives, stopped their work after successive acts of discrimination by the management.

The news that long-standing gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell will be the Green Party’s candidate in Oxford East at the next general election has generated some debate on the left.

By Pete Radcliff

We do not know the 3 May local election results at the time of going to press. But the BNP will probably have had a substantial number of council election successes.
A fuller post-election analysis of the BNP results can be found here

In the first round of the French presidential election, on 22 April, postal worker Olivier Besancenot, standing for the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, won 1.5 million votes (4.11%). That was 300,000 more votes for Besancenot than in the 2002 poll, which at the time was considered a surprisingly good score for a revolutionary candidate.

By Amina Saddiq

The British government is under pressure from Russian president Vladimir Putin to extradite dissident businessman Boris Berezovsky after the latter publicly called for the violent overthrow of Putin’s increasingly anti-democratic regime.

After agreeing to publish an article on TGWU’s position on the McDonnell Leadership issue for a recent edition, the left Labour Party weekly Tribune suddenly pulled apparently whilst at the printers.

by Colin Waugh

674,700 Work-based learning and community education places have been lost through government funding changes in 2005-06.

Over 1000 people demonstrated in Hackney in opposition to proposed cuts in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses on April 27th, with marches from Islington, Tower Hamlets and Hackney boroughs converging outside Hackney Town Hall.

From Cambridge Education Not for Sale

80 students and trade unionists demonstrated outside Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge on May Day in protest at the course and job cuts being proposed by ARU management.

Docklands Light Railway workers In London scored a victory when they forced the reinstatement of a work colleague after threatening to run a strike ballot.

RMT activist Janine Booth has set up an online petition against the proposed ticket office closures on London Underground. Please pledge your support at petitions.pm.gov.uk/tubetickets/.

The Offshore Industry Liaison Committee, the union for offshore rig workers, is one step closer to merging with the RMT union after the OILC executive voted to back the merger.

By Mike Fenwick

At Unison health conference in Brighton on 22-24 April, the main decision was to reject the 2.5% pay settlement and go for industrial action.

By Martin Thomas

On Sunday 29 April, US troops in Baghdad fought a sizeable battle with Moqtada al-Sdar’s Shia-Islamist Mahdi Army. It was another indication that, as we reported in Solidarity 3/110, the US may be edging towards a “war on two fronts” in Iraq, against both the Sunni sectarian militias and the Mahdi Army.

Oaxaca

As we went to press, teachers in Oaxaca city were planning to take strike action in a further sign of the revival of the movement which rose to prominence last year.

By Sean Matgamna

“The revolution... made its first steps toward victory under the belly of a Cossack’s horse”, wrote Leon Trotsky, describing the start of the Russian Revolution of February 1917.

World Flowers imports cut flowers from around the world, Spain, Morocco, especially Kenya. The company has a annual turnover of over £100 million, delivering 1.5 billion flowers a year, trading with Tesco, Sainsbury and Waitrose. This fast-growing company recently switched to employing migrant workers. Is this — or rather paying minimum wages to workers vulnerable to exploitation — the secret of their success?

Paul Mason, author of Live working or die Fighting (Harvill Secker), spoke to Mark Osborn

By Sofie Buckland

In 2003, the Republican-controlled Congress voted to outlaw “partial-birth abortion”, an entirely made-up anti-choice term for the dilation and extraction (D&X) abortion procedure.

By Cathy Nugent

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted 66 to 54 at its recent annual delegate meeting for a motion brought by the South Yorkshire branch which says, among other things, that the union should call “for a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions, and the TUC to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government and the United Nations.”

Bruce Robinson ‘Coming to terms with nature’, the 2007 edition of Socialist Register (Merlin, £14.95).

Tim Row reviews the Artic Monkeys’ second album

The Arctic Monkeys’ massive-selling first album Whatever People Say I Am, I’m Not established them as the biggest new thing since Oasis.

Caroline Henry reviews This is England

This is England is a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Thatcher’s Britain from Nottingham based director Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands).

We continue our series about socialist novels. Steve Cohen introduces May Day, by John Sommerfield, published in 1936