Workers' Liberty

To download text as pdf, click on the "attachments" below. Second attachment is an updated version, 02/11/07..

Dear comrade Harman,
I know you of old and hope, or would like to believe, that you still hold to the basic socialist ideas which you and I shared in the past.

See also: Open Letter to an IS Leader, August 2004: From the "IS Tradition" to Respect; and more on Respect.

When the National Union of Students commissioned its “no holds barred” governance review after annual conference 2007, the left was criticized for pre-emptively declaring it an attack on democracy. The findings of the review was discussed at a national committee meeting on 9 October, and guess what? It’s a massive attack on democracy.

In Solidarity 3/118 we began a series of articles about the events in Northern Ireland in 1969 — when the nearly 50 year old Northern Ireland state broke down, and the British Army went on the streets to hold it together — and the debates and disputes which that provoked in the British left.

Review of The Islamist, by Ed Husain

French rail, gas, and electricity workers are striking on 18 October over pensions, privatisation and their right to strike. The new right-wing French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has bitten off more than he can chew.

About three hundred people marched through central London on Sunday 7 October as part of the “Al Quds Day” march organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

ON the Al Quds march, I held two placards. One with a Palestinian flag and “Free Palestine”, and the other with a photograph of a 16-year-old girl, Atefeh Rajabi Sahaaleh, who was executed in 2004 by the Iranian regime for “crimes against chastity”, having been sexually abused since childhood.

The debate within UCU, the University and College Union, on whether to launch a boycott of Israeli academia has been called off after lawyers consulted by the leadership declared a boycott “illegal”. After a unanimous vote by the Strategy and Finance Committee, including members of UCU Left, union branches have been told they cannot vote on a boycott,

Repression of opposition groups, including the socialist Labour Party, Pakistan continues. At the end of September ten members, including General Secretary Farooq Tariq, were arrested, at a protest against General Pervez Musharraf filing nomination papers for a second presidential term.

Last month, for the first time in 37 years the US United Auto Workers (UAW) union launched a two-day nationwide strike against General Motors. The strike involved 73,000 production workers.

Party should be “committed to socialist policies” now lacks any means by which it might be carried through. The only practical suggestion was that, given the dramatic loss in Labour Party membership, it was now much easier for the left to take over moribund constituency parties (and presumably the smaller they get, the better, as it then becomes even easier).

As the banker James Pierpoint Morgan said, everybody has two reasons for things they do: the good reason, and the real reason.

Down to the 1880s there was no “labour movement” [in Britain] in the continental sense at all. There were strong trade unions (of skilled workers), and these unions were politically-minded — but the only parties were the two ruling-class ones, the Tories and the Liberals.

The political situation in Poland before the parliamentary elections (scheduled for 21 October), is dominated by competition between two parties of the right. These are Law and Justice (PiS) (now in power) and Civic Platform (PO). Both represent right populist politics, but of different kinds.

As thousands of monks and others protesters remain under arrest and subject to torture in Burma, campaigners in 30 cities around the world staged a series of rallies last weekend against the bloody crackdown.

850,000 members of UNISON in Local Government will be receiving ballot papers over the next few weeks to vote on strike action over pay.

In Leeds, a local public sector unity committee was set up in June. It drew over 100 to a launch rally on 12 July, with speakers from Unison Local Government and Health, NUT, CWU, PCS and UCU.

Several thousand people, including many hundreds of London students, marched from Trafalgar Square to Parliament on 8 October as part of a Stop the War Coalition protest timed to coincide with Gordon Brown’s Commons statement on Iraq — in defiance of the police’s refusal to grant permission for the demonstration.

Nuclear power is dangerous, expensive and unnecessary to cut global greenhouse gas emissions. It is bound up with nuclear weapons. We should oppose the expansion of nuclear power in today’s conditions of capitalist globalisation.

Iranian sugar workers strike

When it comes to Israel/Palestine and the Middle East more generally, as with so many international issues, much of the revolutionary left prefers to compete to see who can be the shrillest “anti-imperialist” rather than seriously analysing the politics of the region from a class-struggle perspective and identifying working class forces with which they can make practical solidarity.

On Monday November 5 the National Union of Journalists are to hold a day of action — Stand Up for Journalism day — across the UK and Ireland, to highlight cuts in the media.

London Underground cleaners in the RMT continue to organise. About three weeks ago, cleaning staff at Morden Underground depot succeeded in fighting their management's imposition of a new 7-day a week roster, which would have allowed them no days off!

PCS is now in the midst of balloting its members concerning future industrial action.

The NUT National Executive voted yesterday to confirm plans to ballot members to oppose the government’s planned pay limit for public sector workers.

The postal workers’ four day walk-out on 5-9 October was, once again, approaching 95% solid. More strikes are planned from 15 October, and there can be no doubt that they will be solid too. But will they be enough to win?

Parliamentary elections took place in Ukraine on 30 September; western pundits are proclaiming these may “have saved the Orange Revolution”, of 2004. The elections were an effort to resolve the political crisis in Ukraine, triggered by by President Viktor Yushchenko’s decree on 2 April dissolving parliament, after a protracted power struggle between rival blocs.

Alistair Darling’s pre-Budget statement on 9 October promised real wage cuts for public sector workers through to 2011, as well as choking back health and education spending and decreeing extra job cuts in the civil service, especially the Department of Work and Pensions.

The 3 November demonstration in defence of the NHS will be the focus for the growing tide of anger at government attacks on the health service.

Their triumphalism has been a little chastened. New Labour politicians these days are not quite as bold as Tony Blair was when he told Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight before the 2001 election that he was not bothered about a widening gap between rich and poor.