Workers' Liberty

Who fears to praise Red Seventeen?
Who quails at Lenin’s name?
When liars mock at Trotsky's fate
Who adds his, “Theirs the blame”?

US Vice-President Dick Cheney is reported to have thought up a clever scheme to launch an attack on Iran.

Gorgeous George by David Morley

Given his colossal ego, z-list celebrity status and continuing admiration of Stalinist politics, it is hard to imagine a better candidate for biography than George Galloway. However, those who deduce from David Morley’s chosen title, “Gorgeous George”, that the book is irreverent or cutting will be greatly disappointed.

The first act of the four SWP-allied councillors who have split away from the main Respect opposition group in Tower Hamlets was not to launch a high-profile campaign aimed on any of the many issues which affecting workers in the borough — for instance the threatened transfer of council housing to an ALMO. After the SWP’s noises about breaking from the “ineffectiveness” and “communalism” of Respect in Tower Hamlets, surely this would have been an appropriate course.
Instead it has been widely reported that the new group of Respect (Independent) councillors — Ahmed Hussain, Lutfa Begun, Oli Rahman and Rania Khan — have begun talks with the Liberal-Democrat councillors to form a new opposition coalition!

The last three issues of Solidarity have carried Sean Matgamna’s series about the British left and the events in Northern Ireland in 1968-9 — arguably the biggest internal crisis the British state has seen since the early 1920s. The last article (Solidarity 3/120) summed up the turning-point debate at the National Committee of IS (forerunner of the SWP) in January 1969, and the initial positions mapped out by the IS/SWP majority and by the Trotskyist Tendency within IS (forerunner of Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty).

• Part 1: Why Northern Ireland Broke Down,

• Part 2: The Irish Workers' Group, I S and the "Trotskyist Tendency",
• Part 3: Why Northern Ireland Split on Communanal, Not Class, Lines
  
  

Dave Warren is a member of the Postal Executive of the post and telecom union CWU. He opposed the deal with Royal Mail endorsed by a majority of the Executive on 22 October, and has been campaigning for a no vote in the ballot on the deal which runs between 9 and 27 November. He spoke to Solidarity.

Why did Pakistan’s military ruler General Musharraf risk millions of dollars in military and other financial aid from the US and EU by declaring martial law on 3 November?

This is the 90th anniversary of the Russian workers’ revolution of November 1917. Since the fall in 1991 of the Stalinist regime which eventually overwhelmed the workers’ government and made a counter-revolution in the 1920s, more has been available to researchers in the west. Some new books have advanced our understanding of the revolution. None, however, can match the exciting exposition of the course of 1917, in Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution

The London socialist feminist reading group went to see Heroines of Revolution, a play by the New Factory of the Eccentric Actor.

The Last Legion is an unusual film. It deals with the late Roman Empire and the nominal last emperor of the West, the juvenile Romulus Augustulus.

Former Socialist Alliance activists give their views:

Pete McLaren was the secretary of the Socialist Alliance before the heavy involvement of the SWP in 2001-3, and is now secretary of the continuing Socialist Alliance group:

The Stop The War Coalition conference on 27 October featured Somaye Zadeh from the SWP-led group Campaign Iran telling us that “the lies about Iran” aren’t true.

I joined the Socialist Workers Party at their Marxism summer school in July 2005. It was around the time of Make Poverty History and the G8 protests and I had come to realise that the solution was getting rid of capitalism - and that’s what the SWP said they were for.

The following text is my speech given at Workers' Liberty’s London forum on “Sixty years since Indian independence”. The other speaker was Sarbjit Johal from South Asia Solidarity

On Sunday 4 November, a meeting was held at Birkbeck College in London to launch a united campaign against the attacks on democracy included in the “Governance Review” of the National Union of Students. Attended by 50 student activists and student union officers — including members of Education Not for Sale, Workers’ Liberty, the SWP, Socialist Students, the Young Greens, and a variety of independents — the meeting discussed the nature of the attacks within the context of years of NUS inaction and mismanagement, began to plan a campaign against them, and elected a steering committee to take things forward.

Laura Rogers and Rebecca Galbraith sent a longer version of this letter to the Abortion Rights campaign.

On Saturday 20 October we went to Parliament Square expecting to be part of a counter-demonstration to the anti-abortion, anti-women rally; instead we were the demonstration. Where were you? Abortion Rights, as the biggest, best supported, “official” pro-choice campaign, it’s time to up the fight!

Two leaders of the Iranian bus workers’ union have been given long prison sentences for “acting against national security”, according to reports from Iran.

The public service union Unison's ballot of its members in local government for action to improve their 2.475% pay offer produced a small majority for action, but the union's Local Government Executive, meeting on 29 October, decided by a large majority to accept the offer and not to call action.

On Tuesday 6 November 1,500 council workers demonstrated outside Birmingham town hall in protest at a ‘single status’ pay deal which will affect 40,000 staff.

PCS members have voted 67.6%, on a turnout of 33.6%, in favour of continuing the campaign of industrial action, but action is being frustrated by the union’s national leadership.

"British jobs for British workers”. A UK Independence Party slogan? British National Party? National Front? Right now it comes from Labour prime minister Gordon Brown.

“You can expect”, writes US economist Nouriel Roubini, “that the ongoing credit crunch will get much worse in the year ahead and its fallout will spread from the US to Europe and throughout Asia and the globe.

At the turn of the year Labour announced a significant change to school-testing arrangements for students aged 11 and 14. But will the scheme solve the problem of the old tests for students and teachers — stress and demotivation and lessons which are designed to “teach to the test”?

On 29 October the Commons Science and technology committee published a review of the 1967 Abortion Act. They made three main recommendations:

Yayha al Faifi fled Saudi Arabia in 2002 after he was sacked from his job with British Aerospace for trying to organise a workers' meeting to discuss new contracts. He has continued the struggle for workers' rights in Saudi Arabia ever since.

Two leaders of the Iranian bus workers’ union have been given long prison sentences for “acting against national security”, according to reports from Iran.

On 26 November, Britain’s two best-known neo-Nazis: Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, and David Irving, the “historian” and convicted Holocaust denier, have been invited to speak at the “Oxford Union Society”.

French students are uniting with workers to organise a mass opposition to President Sarkozy’s offensive on health, pensions, asylum seekers, the right to strike and education.

A "relaunch to achieve workers’ representation” — that is what supporters of Solidarity will be arguing at the conference of the Labour Representation Committee on 17 November.