Workers' Liberty

Mike Treen, National Director of the New Zealand union Unite, will be touring the country in February as part of a No Sweat national week of action. [Details here]

An increase in, and a strengthening of, stop and search powers looks set to become a key part of the government’s “tough on crime” agenda.

Let’s look on the bright side first. SWP-Respect is reaffirming the need for a left challenge to Livingstone as London mayor.

The battle over arts funding is still raging, with the latest fall-out this week being a £3.5 million cut to the arts in Wales.

An 81 year old retired Irish cardinal, Desmond Connell, has gone to the High Court in Dublin for a writ to stop his successor as Archbishop of Dublin from handing over church files on paedophile priests to a state-organised inquiry into clerical abuse of children.

This leaflet from Leeds NUT outlines the reasons why teachers are fighting for better pay.

Around 70 people heared John McDonnell speak at a Scottish Campaign for Socialism meeting in Glasgow on 2 February.

Lecturers’ strike on 24 April

The UCU has announced plans for strike action for Further Education lecturers to coincide with the action planned by the NUT on 24 April.

Today’s globalised clothing industry involves transnational networks of production and sales in which manufacturing is subcontracted to producers, usually in developing countries.

You’ve tasted the Big Mac, you’ve probably had some McNuggets in your time but how about getting your chops round a McA-Level? Sceptical? Me too.

The narrow victory of Boris Tadic in Serbia’s presidential election on 3 February slightly lessens the tensions over the independence of Kosova. But only slightly.

When the scandal broke about a single trader running up £4.7 billion in losses for the French bank Société Général, the first response from financiers was shock because they thought Société Général was particularly well-regulated — “the gold standard”, one called it.

The December election was, by all accounts except the Kenyan government’s, rigged to ensure the “re-election” of president Mwai Kibaki. Since then Kenya has been plunged into ethnically-based violence.

In France, bosses have limited powers to regularise migrant workers; and in recent strikes in the Essonne region, this has been used against them.

Students at King’s College London staged two “read-ins” in a cafeteria last month in protest at regulations which bar students from reading, writing or using laptops while eating their lunch.

While the SWP lost dozens of its own members to Galloway’s populist, Stalinist split from Respect, Student Respect remained almost totally solid, with the vast majority of independents siding with SWSS. The positive consequence of this has been a left turn by Student Respect — in terms of a willingness to talk about women’s liberation and abortion rights, for instance — as well as a greater willingness to engage with other socialists like the AWL.

ENS has nominated four candidates for the full-time positions on National Union of Students National Executive.

There is a quotation from the ninth chapter of Moby Dick which I think is very appropriate, kind of our motto: ‘Woe unto him who would pour oil on the waters when God has brewed them into a gale.’

Mario Savio, a student leader of the Free Speech Movement

The law on prostitution is about to change. Whether this will be for the better or the worse, however, remains to be seen.

On 13 January 2007 the Workers’ Climate Action network had its first meeting. The initiative is about working for national unity between the labour movement and activists from the environmental milieu, to change current trade union policy, and create just transition plans for a future of sustainable industry.

About 70 activists from around the country met at the Common Place social centre in Leeds on 26/27 January to discuss a range of proposals after last summer’s Heathrow Camp against Climate Change.

Climate change will remain a significant ecological and political question for the foreseeable future. Marxists like the AWL believe that the working class is the essential social agent in that struggle. We hope the Campaign against Climate Change trade union conference on 9 February will help the drive to win the labour movement to action on the issue.

It was the fusion of blues with ragtime and Jazz in the early twenties by band leaders like Handy that popularised the blues. His signature work was the St Louis Blues. The other way blues reached white audiences was through the classic female blues performers, the music evolving from informal entertainment in bars to entertainment in theatres.

Irish — The Remarkable Saga of a Nation and a City tells the story of the Irish in Glasgow.

The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism is a recent book written by left-wing writer, journalist and broadcaster Naomi Klein (author of No Logo).

According to Anamaria Marinca, one of the two lead actresses in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, “It isn't a film that is pro-abortion, neither is it against it; it's not as easy as that.”

Continuing a series on the politics of the early modern British socialist movement with a brief assessment of the politics of the socialists in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century.

In his reply to my article on the US elections (Solidarity 3/124), Eric Lee displays complete indifference to the principle of working-class political independence.

There are a lot of myths about accounting. Some of them accountants don’t like — which have to do with their being drab failures as human beings. But they put up with those myths, because they make such a lot of money out of the other set of myths.

Councils are preparing their budgets for 2008-9. Some councils, notably Newcastle and Southampton, are planning sizeable cuts.