Workers' Liberty

"The Labour Representation Committee is a major initiative to take the Labour Party back to its grass roots in the Constituency Labour Parties and the trade unions, to re-establish democratic control of the Party by its rank and file."
John McDonnell MP

Bugging the UN. Whitewashing the dodgy dossiers used to justify the Iraq war by non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction. And pressing on regardless with privatisation, top-up fees, foundation hospitals, and his whole profit-first programme.

• Four Palestinians killed at Separation Wall

• Life at the Separation Wall
• Jerusalem suicide bomb
• Stop the persecution of the Abnaa el-Ballad movement!

Solidarity is virtually alone in putting the case for working-class political independence. We call for independent working-class representation, untainted by 'dirty money' and links to oppressive regimes. We only have our supporters to rely on.

Last month the Government announced that would-be economic migrants from the Eastern European countries soon joining the EU will be welcome in Britain only if they have a job to come to. Those without jobs will not be able to claim benefits, so they shouldn't bother coming.

In Manchester 400 students and lecturers marched together in support of the two-day strike on 25-26 February by the Association of University Teachers against their proposed pay deal, and against top-up fees for students in higher education. Across the country, the AUT strike had led to university departments shutting down and enthusiastic picketing by a normally non-militant group of workers.

Katharine Gun makes no claim to be a leader or even a supporter of the labour movement. She makes no general public political statements. She was a junior employee of the government's GCHQ spy centre, so it is unlikely that she is any sort of left-winger.

But she took risks in order to make a stand for what she thought was right.

The Government's spying services employ 6,000 people at GCHQ alone. MI5 headquarters, on Millbank in London, and MI6 headquarters, across the river in Vauxhall, employ about 2,000 each. According to MI5's own website, the spying agencies' budget is £1 billion a year. It is a big operation.

Militant class struggle has been a feature of South Korean politics for many years. In April there are elections to the National Assembly (parliament) and some workers' candidates are standing.

This critical assessment is written by Won Youngsu, a member of the South Korean Marxist group, the Power of the Working Class. It is abridged from International Viewpoint No 356, February 2004.

• India: 30 million strike

• Car workers strike in Brazil
• Repression of Chinese workers

India: 30 million strike

Thirty million workers in India went on 24-hour strike last week to protest over a Supreme Court ruling that said government employees had no right to strike because it inconvenienced citizens and cost the state money.

• Indonesia: textile workers' victory

• No Sweat discusses Iraq workers' solidarity
• Women's TUC fringe meeting
• No Sweat steering group
• Play Fair Olympics campaign

Indonesia: textile workers' victory

Plans for International Women's Day celebrations in Iran this year include a meeting of women's NGOs in Park Laleh in Tehran. Although the government has issued a permit for this protest, events in the last few days show the 'conservatives' keen to show their authority following the sham elections. A meeting of the 'Writers' Association' was banned, and reports from Tehran indicate that Islamic vigilantes are being used to enforce a more rigid form of hejab on women and young girls.

David Trimble's Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) has withdrawn from the British government-organised "review" of the six-year-old Good Friday Agreement. Trimble accuses Blair of "rank moral cowardice" for not expelling Sinn Fein from the review in reprisal for the recent attempt by the IRA to kidnap a man in central Belfast.

US, Canadian and French soldiers have moved into Haiti following the departure of the president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who fled into exile on Sunday 29 February. Aristide found shelter in the Central African Republic and later claimed he had been forced to leave.

• Can't work, must work

• Profits up, wages down
• Cashing in!
• Iraqi gold
• Hands off the US!

We begin our series on the 1984-5 miners' strike. We will follow the events, re-tell the story and reflect on the lessons.

The events

1 March 1984: National Coal Board announces the closure of Cortonwood Colliery in Yorkshire and a cut back of 4 million tonnes of coal in the forthcoming year with a loss of 20,000 jobs. South Yorkshire miners go on unofficial strike.

I was going to entitle this article "The French Galloway", but French comrades tell me that would be grossly unjust to Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the subject of the article.

Chevènement was a member of the Socialist Party and president of the Franco-Iraqi Friendship Society from 1985. In 1991 he resigned his post as Defence Minister - he would surely have been sacked otherwise - because he opposed the US war against Iraq in that year, which the French government supported.

The Russian presidential elections take place on 14 March. None of the candidates are even remotely on the left. Vladimir Putin, the current president, will win. The other six candidates may gather 25% of the votes between them. Who are these people?

One of the most surprising aspects of the discussions on the left about the Respect coalition is the extent of the reaction to the SWP's decision to drop the demand for MPs "on a worker's wage".

In principle, revolutionary socialists would not necessarily let their own commitment to a worker's wage for MPs stop them forming limited agreement for some common action in the class struggle with Labour MPs who rejected that idea.

From the Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq

In January 2004 an Islamic militia group called Jaish Alsahaba, "Army of Sahaba", sent an email containing a death threat against Yanar Mohammed, chairperson of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) and editor of the Al Mousawat (Equality) newspaper.

The US-appointed Interim Governing Council of Iraq has a agreed a "fundamental law" which establishes a temporary constitution, designed to enable the occupation Coalition Provisional Authority to hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi government at the beginning of July this year. The law says that elections will be held by the end of 2004 or early in 2005.

Paul Hampton continues his series about world trade

Many of the young people, NGOs and unions who mobilised for the big demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, or in Cancun and Miami last year, argue that the alternative to the neo-liberal, free trade agenda of the multinationals, the big powers and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is 'fair trade'. Three million people have signed Oxfam's petition to 'make trade fair'.

The Oxfam report Trading away our rights: women working in global supply chains was published to coincide with 'Fair Trade Fortnight'. Matt Cooper gives his view.

Walk into any supermarket in Britain and look at the fruit and veg - it's grown in Kenya, South Africa or Honduras. The jeans in the clothes shops and the supermarkets are made in Romania, Taiwan or Cambodia. The cut-throat nature of modern retail means that the clothes are constantly discounted in a culture of the year-round sale, the fruit in two-for-one promotions.

John O'Mahony continues his series of articles on the roots of Bolshevism

Populism "denied a future to Russian capitalism. The proletariat was assigned no independent role at all in the revolution. It happened accidentally, however, that propaganda designed in its content for the villages found a sympathetic response only in the cities... assembling only the intelligentsia and some individual industrial workers".

Martin Thomas' article on the veil (Solidarity 3/46) starts out well but he gets dragged down into a swamp of confusion in his attempt to defend the right for French girls to wear the veil at school.

Many activists are debating whether we should "reclaim the Labour Party", or instead "build a new party". I will argue that the real choice is different. Either we do both - "reclaim the Labour Party", to the extent that such a thing is possible, and "build a new party" - or we do neither.

The leadership of the FBU are preparing to follow the RMT into conflict with the Labour Party leadership, by proposing to next month's FBU conference a shake-up of the union's political activity. This will include a reduction in donations to the Labour Party, and a move which would return FBU policy to the position of the 2001 conference - with the exception that this time, the leadership will be proposing it, rather than fighting it.

Reuven Kaminer takes issue with the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's analysis of the Geneva Accords, a sketch of a possible "two-states" peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians published by Israeli soft-leftists and Palestinian leaders in October 2003. This is a reply to Pappe's article "The Geneva Bubble" which first appeared in the London Review of Books, 8 January 2004.

The strike action at the DWP and Driving Standards Agency on 16 and 17 February was a wonderful display of solidarity. It showed just how wrong the majority on the PCS Executive of the DWP was in calling off the strikes planned for the 29 and 30 January. With thousands of non-members also joining the union, there can be no doubting the desire of DWP members to win this dispute.

Members of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) staged a 24-hour strike on Thursday 26 February in seven Further Education Colleges. The strike had been triggered by the failure of management in those colleges to implement a nationally agreed pay deal.

Across many grades, the "cover" staff are getting a raw deal. Shifts changed at a moment's notice give no chance to plan a social life or organise child care. Tubeworker has launched a campaign which wants: