Workers' Liberty

Racists. Rich racists. Media billionaires cynically using racism to create scapegoats. Britain has too many of them.

The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns (NCADC) is urging support for three Iranian Kurds from Glasgow who have been on hunger strike for three weeks.

From Gush Shalom

Just two days after Madrid the sickening images are once again coming from closer to home, with the news of a suicide bombing at the Israeli port of Ashdod. Once again the cycle of bloodshed is rolling on. (And, once again a day of mass, unarmed Palestinian resistance was overshadowed by the acts of two young desperados.) For the players on both sides of the lethal ping-pong, casualties are instrumentalized into ammunition, into a licence to kill the other side's men, women, old and young.

The second in our series looking back at the miners' strike details the events up to April 1984.

21 March 1984: power unions (including the GMB) advise their members to cross picket lines. Steelworkers will also cross picket lines.

• Zanón factory - two years under workers' control

• Anti-privatisation protest in Thailand
• Korean workers win wider union rights

Zanón factory - two years under workers' control

UK current legislation includes the Terrorism Act 2000, enacted to harmonise the separate laws covering Britain and Northern Ireland.

By Rosalind Robson

It will be a long time before the full truth emerges about the penal camps on the US military base at Guantanamo Bay - if indeed the truth ever does emerge. Despite nearly 100 releases so far, as many as 660 men are still being held in conditions of near secrecy.

In the lead-up to the Athens Olympic Games in August, the Clean Clothes Campaign, Oxfam and trade unions across the world will be campaigning for sportswear workers' rights.

The campaign was launched on 4 March with events in more than 25 countries.

In Canada, Bruce Kidd, a Canadian athlete, raised a clothes-line of brand name sportswear with statistics highlighting the abuse of workers' rights.

Mark Osborn spoke to Charles Arthur of the Haiti Support Group about the situation in Haiti now


Charles explains: the current US intervention numbers about 1,500 troops, and the total foreign force comes to about 2,500.

An attempt to violently break the union-organising drive at the Ouanaminthe Free Trade Zone in north-east Haiti on 1-2 March has been met by a wave of international solidarity in support of the Haitian trade unionists.

In December LG Electronics, an $18 billion Korean company, transferred 350 components workers at their Reynosa TV plant to an abandoned warehouse. The workers first had to suffer rats and snakes while production was set up. They are exposed to the fumes from soldering and numerous chemicals with little or no protective equipment. They earn $43-$58 US per week.

By Harry Glass

The general elections on 5 April will not provide a solution to the problems faced by the Indonesian people because the majority of political parties are rotten, says the People's Democratic Party (PRD) in Indonesia.

• Shell shocks

• BP rising
• In the red
• Evening Standard stupidity watch

It gets curiouser and curiouser, the Galloway affair. The champion of Saddam Hussein's fascistic Iraq, the loyal personal friend of the Iraqi Hitler's loyal deputy Tariq Aziz, the man who leads the list of the SWP's Respect coalition for the Euro-elections in June, has defended himself against AWL and Solidarity - in a letter to the Weekly Worker.

The battles about hijab-wearing in French state schools have almost exclusively concerned girls of 13 or older. I would not argue that 13 is old enough to abandon entirely the supervision and discipline which we take as obviously necessary for smaller children, but which would be unjust imposition on, say, 18 year olds. I am in favour of public laws (against child labour, for a sexual age of consent), sometimes as a counter to parents' supervision.

No Sweat are organising solidarity with the re-emerging labour movement in Iraq. Who will fight for democratic rights and decent living conditions in Iraq? The best hope is the re-emerging labour movement. For 35 years the Ba'thist dictatorship crushed all independent politics and trade-union organisation. Now independent trade unions have been formed, distinct from Saddam's old state-controlled General Federation of Trade Unions.

By Peter Burton

The Scottish Socialist Party's conference at Edinburgh University on 27-28 March has three times more motions before it than last year. A warning has been put out that speaking time will be short and there is no time for international speakers to address conference.

Ewa Jasiewicz spent eight months in Iraq, mainly in Baghdad and Basra, working for Occupation Watch. She worked with the trade union movement in Basra, especially the Southern Oil Company Union. From Basra she used to post regular reports at the anarchist website infoshop (www.infoshop.org), and via other web resources (for example, Voices in the Wilderness), about workers' struggles in Iraq. Clive Bradley talked to her.

Martin Thomas moved the motion opposing Respect at the SA conference

Respect is not democratic, not inclusive, and not socialist. Its political platform is similar to the Greens. The Greens already exist. There is no point creating a second-rate replica. The ideas of common ownership, workers' control, workers' representatives on a worker' wage, or workers' representation of any sort, are missing from the platform.

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

"The Russian proletarian is no novice in the revolutionary movement. You know that it was a worker who blew up the imperial palace in February 1880. The very idea for this action was conceived in a workers' group."

By Martin Thomas

In the last issue of Solidarity I argued that Marxists must both fight to "reclaim the Labour Party" (to the limited extent that such a thing is possible) and "build a new party". These are not two alternative lines of action, but two necessary and complementary aspects of a coherent strategy.

Rail union RMT suspended strike action by Metronet maintenance and signal workers, scheduled for 12 March.

RMT members had voted 5:1 for action in support of colleagues sacked despite the lack of evidence linking them to beer cans allegedly found in a mess room at Farringdon station.

Nursery nurses in Scotland are continuing their indefinite strike action after the Scottish Parliament rejected calls for a national pay settlement. Around 300 of the 5,000 nurses on strike demonstrated for improved pay outside the Scottish Parliament as MSPs debated the issue on 11 March.

The Lyons report, just published, proposes to abolish 20,000 Civil Service posts in London and the South-East by 2009. The Gershon review looking for "efficiency" savings across the public sector is due to report in the coming weeks. According to press leaks, it is looking to get rid of 80,000 jobs by 2011.

The Department of Work and Pensions PCS reps' meeting on 6 March discussed the action against the pay freeze. The exec's only proposal was to continue with action short of strike action, and to have a three-day strike after Easter. No strategy to win the dispute was outlined, and no further plans were mentioned. The GEC appears to believe that escalation of the dispute is simply a matter of taking people out on strike for more days than last time.

By Alan Clarke and Sally Murdock

Although nothing was confirmed when Solidarity went to press, it looks likely that the Third Reading of the Higher Education Bill will take place on 31 March - the last day before the parliamentary Easter break, and also the third day of this year's Conference of the National Union of Students. The Higher Education Bill introduces "top-up fees" for university education in place of the current flat-rate fee.

by Brian Wilson

"If there is one person I have to select as as a living genius of pop music, I would choose Brian Wilson." George Martin, Beatles producer
"I lost my way, heh, heh, heh." Brian Wilson

With sell-out concerts at the Royal Festival Hall and major coverage in the serious press, Brian Wilson, aged 61, is back. He is back playing music he wrote when he was just 24.

Last year we were re-introduced to Pet Sounds, consistently voted best album of all time by music journalists. This year Wilson has compiled the most famous unfinished album in rock history, Smile, abandoned 37 years ago.

BBC2

If there is a national myth about the Second World War which still holds sway in the public imagination, it is that of the "miracle of Dunkirk", the "little ships" which rescued retreating British troops from the Normandy coast in June 1940, when France fell to the Nazis. BBC2's dramatic recreation of these events gained more than five million viewers, almost matching the viewing figures for Footballers' Wives on ITV!

The Basque Country, Euskadi, is a region in the north-east of Spain with a distinct language and culture. About two million people live there. There is also a smaller Basque population in France.

No more lies!

We reproduce a statement signed by 'The Families of the victims of the 11 March', delivered at 2am to the demonstration on 14 March. It appears in Spanish on the website of El Militante, a group linked to Socialist Appeal in Britain.