Workers' Liberty

First posted 24/11/07. After a month of organising their pet sabbaticals to request an extraordinary conference to push through attacks on democracy, the NUS leadership have succeeded; the conference will be held in Leicester on Tuesday 4 December.

(First section: click here for continuation)
This article is the fifth in a series by Sean Matgamna about the British left and the events in Northern Ireland in 1968-9 — the biggest internal crisis the British state has seen since the early 1920s.

• 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 Communal, Not Class, Lines
• Part 4: When militant sloganeering meant promoting communal war

For Australia’s federal election on 24 November, the ACTU (Australian TUC) is for the first time ever producing its own “how-to-vote” cards, suggesting a Green vote for the Senate.
Click here for Riki Lane's article

At the time of writing, 270 day-centre workers employed by Glasgow City Council are beginning their sixth week of all-out indefinite strike action.

The RMT’s campaign to organise cleaners on the underground is gaining strength, and more and more, it is being directed by the cleaners themselves.

In July 2007 three retired firefighters were told by the Fire Authority in London (LFEPA) that their pensions would stop. This arose because of changes to the rules of the Firefighters’ Pension Scheme. The three were told that, because they were still capable of performing some duties, specifically, because they were still fit to do a desk job, they were not eligible to receive a pension.

A Heathrow shop assistant who wrote poems glorifying terrorism on WHSmith till roll and possessed “terrorist handbooks” has been convicted under the 2000 Terrorism Act.

According to SNP leader and Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, Scotland will be independent by 2017.

Salmond’s claim follows earlier SNP predictions which came and went but left the Union unscathed. The SNP’s best known prognostication was its slogan of the early 1990s: “Scotland Free by 93.” As the then Scottish Labour Party leader, Donald Dewar, commented in a rare moment of humour: “It’s a good slogan. It rhymes, and they can revive it every ten years.”

The government wants to extend the time for which terrorism suspects can be detained without charge from 28 to 56 days.

Tens of thousands of striking public sector workers, railway workers and students took to the streets on 20 November to protest against Sarkozy’s attacks on their pensions, education, and health service.

Far from being only a footnote to the French strike, the rail workers’ strike on 14-17 November — about union recognition and pay — is an important struggle.

In 1994, the former East German Reichsbahn was merged with the West German Bundesbahn, and the new company, Deutsche Bahn, became a “private” company, albeit owned entirely by the state. Since the fall of the Wall, 400,000 jobs on the German railways have been destroyed, yet the new company has only made a profit since 2005.

Even with Labour and the Conservatives outdoing each other to be the party of big business and wealth, some poor people are still popular at Westminster — that is poor people in other countries. Laments for the scale of global poverty and a stern faced insistence on the need to do something about it are becoming the favoured recourse of every politician, most obviously Gordon Brown.

The ballot on whether postal workers will accept the deal brokered between the Communication Workers’ Union and Royal Mail closes on 27 November.

34,000 blue-collar construction workers employed by “Arabtec” in the “United Arab Emirates” are said to have returned to work after a three-week strike (14 November).

This autumn immigration issues have once again been centre stage, starting with the publication of a report by the Office of National Statistics on 23 October 2007 and then some revisions of Governmen

I’m a second year university student working part-time in a service-sector job (a nightclub). Having the job means I never have to choose between buying books or buying lunch.

Although elements of the job are enjoyable and positive (interaction with customers is sometimes very rewarding, and benefits such as free tickets to events held in the club are worth having as a student) the amount of casual and not-so-casual exploitation that takes place is outrageous.

Right to fight back

From Lutte Ouvrière, 16 November. By Arlette Laguiller, translated by Darren Bedford

Using the pretext that these [public sector] workers were the last to enter into the already-existing pension scheme, the government is calling them “privileged”.

At the time of writing (16 November), six days into their strike, French transport workers are refusing to back down. In spite of constant attacks in the press, and union leaders trying to weasel their way out of a fight, rail workers are keeping up the pressure and the leading the public sector fightback against Sarkozy’s reforms.

At the time of writing it is three weeks into General Pervez Musharraf’s full-scale “emergency” military rule in Pakistan. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of lawyers, civil and human rights activists and trade unionists remain in jail.

On Monday November 5, the Writers’ Guild of America went on strike for the first time in nearly twenty years. Last minute negotiations with the employers’ organisation, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) failed to reach a deal. The WGA (which for perverse historical reasons is actually two unions, the WGA west and the WGA east) “downed pencils”.

About an hour and a half into the "Respect Renewal" conference held by George Galloway and his allies on 17 September (at which point I left), there were about 200 people present. So the widely cited figure of 250 is probably about right.

The SWP-Respect conference at Westminster University on 17 November was essentially an SWP event — extra observers were turned away “for lack of space”.

The following films are not necessarily the best documentary films every made, and by no means the only films that have changed the course of events in the real world. But they have been either innovative in some aspect of film technique or led to changes in the way filmmakers represented the “creative treatment of reality” (John Grierson). All of the films have been highly influential.

Into The wild reviewed.

I like to think I’m a pretty low-tech, non-materialistic kind of person. Apart from a few books, I’ve not accumulated much stuff over the years.

Elizabeth, the Golden Age reviewed.

I have a lasting grievance against Solidarity. Why? Because on the recommendation of its review of the film Elizabeth (Elizabeth I to the new Elizabeth II so to speak) I went to see Elizabeth, the Golden Age. It was more than disappointment you expect from all such films.

Eve Garrard has circulated the following on the activists’ e-list of the lecturers’ union UCU.

“Our union is affiliated to the Stop the War Coalition, which is holding a conference on 1 December. One of the speakers it has invited to this conference is Ibrahim Mousawi, the editor of al-Manar TV, Hizbullah’s broadcasting network.

As reported in the last Solidarity, a lot is being done in Oxford by local unions, Labour branches, student unions and community groups to stop the Holocaust denier David Irving and the BNP leader Nick Griffin speaking at the Oxford Union student debating society on 26 November. However, the contribution of the Unite Against Fascism national office has been questionable.

No one needs to tell feminist activists that the fight for women’s liberation has not been won. In Britain women make up 70% of recipients of the pathetically low minimum wage, we face cuts and privatisation in the public services so many of us rely on, domestic violence and rape aren’t taken seriously by a judicial system full of ancient male chauvinist judges and disinterested police, we still have to cast doubt on our own mental health to get an abortion, and we struggle to find high-quality affordable care for our children if we study or to work.

The strike to get sacked UNISON steward Karen Reissmann reinstated is continuing. Karen was sacked for speaking out against cuts.

The Liberal Democrats are calling on the Government to nationalise the failed bank Northern Rock, and denouncing New Labour from being held back from this course by "ideological preoccupations".