Workers' Liberty

By Sue Denham

The Branch Delegate Conference of the T&G was on the surface a boring affair. No dramatic conference arguments; composites were passed in almost every case with GEC endorsement. Excellent positions on asylum seekers and the organisation of migrant workers, no hint of a right-wing agenda.

Affiliation to the United Campaign for the Repeal of the Anti-Trade Union Laws (UCRATUL) went through with GEC recommendation and was passed as part of a comprehensive composite on anti-trades union legislation.

By David Stamp, independent member of Birmingham Socialist Alliance

Whatever future the Socialist Alliance may have — and I’m no longer sure it even has one — it’s going to be an uphill struggle to recapture anything approaching a spirit of trust or unity within the Birmingham left following the antics on 1 July.

From Workers' Left Unity-Iran

Over the last few weeks, the demonstrations and sit-ins organised by textile workers in Behshahr in northern Iran have come to symbolise the long struggle of the Iranian workers for the right to a decent wage, the right to work.

Mark Osborn’s “alternative analysis” (Solidarity 3/32) of the Middle East “roadmap” misses all the important points.

The Socialist Alliance can either continue on the road of class struggle working class politics, that is, on the course Solidarity and Workers' Liberty, together with others - not then the Socialist Workers' Party - set for it four years ago.Or it can adopt the cross-class popular frontist politics which the biggest organisation in the SA now, the SWP, advocates.

By Nicole Ashford

So, did Alastair Campbell sex up that dossier? It's a question that brings to mind oft-quoted lines about the Pope and bears. Come on. Alastair Campbell is paid to sex up Government information. That's his job. The idea that on this occasion, with public opinion split on the war and Tony Blair desperately needing to win round his own MPs, Campbell sat back, put his feet up and tossed the dossier back with a "Looks fine to me" is laughable.

Tom Belton assesses the future of football finance

After the abolition of the maximum wage, the Bosman Ruling, the Premier League, millionaire sugar daddies, and the collapse of ITV Digital, football fans could be forgiven for thinking that they had seen it all, but three weeks ago the football world witnessed an event that could spell the advent of an era that no one anticipated.

Step forward Roman Abramovich, billionaire oil tycoon, Russian State Governor and proud new owner of Chelsea Football Club.

Organise the rank and file

By Colin Foster

The broadside condemnation of Blair's New Labour government by the RMT railworkers' union conference this week (29 June-4 July) is a welcome jolt to the labour movement. So is the probable decision, soon, by the RMT's Scottish region to affiliate to the Scottish Socialist Party.

But where we go from here depends on what rank-and-file activists and socialists, in the RMT and other unions, make of it.

It might be wishful thinking on our part, but it looks like someone is putting the politics back into Pride. The organisers of Saturday's parade (26 July) are reminding people about the history of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and trans people in the UK - see the Pride Parade website - and asking them to dress up to reflect it!

A young Solidarity supporter shares his impressions of the SWP’s Marxism 2003 conference

By Gerry Bates

When we read about some terrible thing in the past, we ask ourselves: “Why did they let it happen? Why didn’t people do something about it while there was still time?”

The discussion in Solidarity about the trade union relationship to the Blairite Labour Party raises general questions about the relationship of trade unions to working class politics. As a contribution to the ongoing discussion we reprint an article which Leon Trotsky wrote in 1923 in a discussion about French syndicalist politics.

By Patrick Murphy, Secretary Leeds NUT

On 17 July up to 1,800 Leeds teachers will take part in a one-day strike in protest at the compulsory redundancy of 12 colleagues.

The strike comes after a ballot in which 81% of members who took part voted in favour of the action. There are also 29 support workers at risk of redundancy, but they have not been called out on strike.

I have to confess that I was not exactly thrilled when a big, middle-aged, shaven-headed bloke came up to me in a pub in Burnley after I’d been out campaigning for the Labour Party at a recent council by-election and asked me what I thought Labour ought to be doing about “the biggest problem facing Burnley”. I prepared myself to hear a rant about asylum-seekers and asked him what he thought the biggest problem in Burnley was. I was somewhat surprised when he replied that the problem was the Nazis/BNP and the way that Labour was pandering to racism. We had a very amicable discussion in which I managed to persuade him that the thing to do was to join the Labour Party to try to help reinvigorate the local party, because, as I told him, the biggest problem was that the BNP had more local activists putting out their message across Burnley than the Labour Party did.

By Joan Trevor

Six high-school students are being court-martialed in Israel for refusing the draft. Their defence rests on the idea that they are conscientious objectors (CO). If they are unsuccessful, they face long prison sentences.

Many such draft refusers have already sat in military jails for hundreds of days for the crime of refusing.

By Gerry Byrne

Two British citizens Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg, facing a secret US military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay will be given a choice: ‘confess or die’—plead guilty and accept a 20-year prison sentence, or be executed if found guilty.

Chris Hickey concludes his feature on the politics and work of George Orwell. For the first part see Part 1
George Orwell : documenting the Spanish Civil War

Written on the cusp of the Cold War Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four launched Orwell’s international reputation and made him the most politically fought over English writer of the 20th century.

Fantasy of an African boy

by James Berry


Such a peculiar lot
we are, we people
without money, in daylong
yearlong sunlight, knowing
money is somewhere, somewhere.

Everybody says it’s a big
bigger brain bother now,
money. Such millions and millions
of us don’t manage at all
without it, like war going on.

And we can’t eat it. Yet
without it our heads alone

By a postal worker

While Post Office chairman Alan Leighton and his mates award themselves lottery win-sized bonuses, postal workers are being asked to help Royal Mail save money by losing jobs and extending their delivery rounds.

By John Moloney, Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) executive, personal capacity

A joint left/centre electoral slate has won the National Executive elections in the civil service union PCS. On a 14% turnout (down on last year) the slate won 34 seats to the right wing’s nine.

Stop arms sales to Indonesia

By Harry Glass

Alarmed at Indonesia's bloody war in Aceh, its military campaign in West Papua and the brutality of its armed forces, human rights organisations, peace groups, and anti-arms trade campaigners are calling for an international military embargo on Indonesia.

By Mark Osborn

The Colombia Solidarity Campaign (CSC) has called a big protest in London, 22 July, to mark an international day of action against Coca Cola (6pm, Piccadilly Circus).

The CSC says:

Clive Bradley looks at the life and career of Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn, who died at the beginning of July at the age of 96, was not alone among her generation of Hollywood aristocratic ladies in preferring to wear trousers. But the other two women most associated with such manly apparel-Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich-were European, so they probably didn't count.

Hepburn, on the other hand, was from a patrician New England family, educated at an Ivy League university, and even spoke in that almost-British accent which marks out the American upper bourgeoisie.

By Clive Bradley

The American and British forces now occupying Iraq originally promised a quick move to government by the Iraqis themselves. Now a 25-member 'Governing Council' has been formed, meeting for the first time on 13 July. The chief US administrator in Iraq, L Paul Bremer III, has a veto over all its decisions.