Workers' Liberty

"Carnage for the public services"
Mark Serwotka, PCS union General Secretary



By a civil servant



On Monday 12 July Gordon Brown announced the axing of 100,000 civil service jobs. Just like that. It is a job cut programme on a par with the butchery that was done to the mining industry in the last twenty years.

By Clive Bradley

In the last days of June, two days before it had been scheduled, the occupation of Iraq officially ended and a new government was installed.

By Susan Jackson

Last week Tory reactionaries in the House of Lords added a wrecking amendment to Government proposals for Civil Partnership legislation for same-sex couples. The amendment called for the rights that would be available to same-sex couples to be available to those who are carers.

Seven years after Blair's New Labour Party formed its ostentatiously anti-Labour "Labour" government, there are signs at last that the trade unions are beginning to call the Blairites to account.

It is not, in all conscience, before time.

By Pablo Velasco

• Support Egyptian asbestos workers

• Release imprisoned Chinese workers
• British hypocrisy over the Chagos islands

This year's Workers' Liberty summer school was held on 3 and 4 July in Archway, north London. Nicole Ashford reports


There was a wide range of debates on current issues, as well as discussions on historical topics.

• South West London No Sweat

• New video available from Banana Link

South West London No Sweat

• Meeting: Monday 2 August, 7.30pm, BWTUC centre, 898 Garratt Lane, Tooting, SW17. "Solidarity with Iraqi workers'.
  
  

By Maria Exall

The launch conference of the Labour Representation Committee was held on Saturday 3 July. Over 300 delegates packed out the TUC Congress Centre to discuss key policy issues and debate the future of the Labour Party.

• Ciao

• Floods of East Europeans... leave Britain
• Plus ça change...
• Comrade racist?
• Yes, we have bananas

Ciao

For three weeks they drifted in the Mediterranean because no European country was willing to take them in. Then the 37 men - reportedly Sundanese refugees - made it… to the safety of an Italian concrete shed surrounded by barbed wire.

Alex Gordon, from the South Wales and the West region of the seafarers' and railworkers' union RMT, and Billy Hayes, the General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union, contributed to our debate on working class political representation at our Ideas for Freedom Summer school on 3-4 July. We print extracts from their speeches below

By a tube worker

The strike on London Underground on 29-30 June was supported solidly by members of the RMT and received widespread support from members of other unions too.

That tubeworkers heeded the strike call is not surprising, as they had voted by 80% to take strike action, after years of frustration on key pay and conditions issues. Management's pay offer of 3% plus a further 5% in return for future "flexibility" is a joke, and a long way off what tube workers are demanding.

A new socialist party has been founded in Brazil, headed by militants expelled from the Workers' Party (PT). Below is an abridged translation announcing the formation of the party.


The Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (P-SOL) was founded at a conference in Brasília on 5 and 6 June attended by 750 representatives from 22 states. Its initial impulse was given by the parliamentarians Heloísa Helena, Babá, Luciana Genro and João Fontes, the radicals who opposed the leaders of the PT and their government serving national and international capital, the bankers and the landowners, whose measures attack the rights and interests of working people.

The events

13 July: Government withholds tax refunds to striking miners.
19 July: NUM/NCB talks last three days. Despite NUM willingness to negotiate, the NCB are ordered to stand firm by the government. Some of the NCB officials wanted to settle. They were later sacked or resigned.
31 July: South Wales NUM fined £50,000 and the High Court seizes South Wales NUM funds. The union had defied an injunction against picketing granted to two haulage firms. The Tories are beginning to up the stakes.

By Chris Reynolds

Ken Livingstone's response to the strike on the London Underground should prove, if proof were ever needed, that Livingstone is no kind of principled socialist or indeed any kind of decent political choice for working class people.

Gemma Pillay and Jean Lane report from the East End

Cleaners who work on Canary Wharf in east London celebrated a big step forward in their campaign for a living wage on Thursday 8 July. They have won recognition for their union, the TGWU, from one of the major office cleaning contractors, ISS. They are demanding a wage of £6.70 an hour.

Clive Bradley discusses the representation of gay men on TV

Twenty years ago, gay men were figures of fun on television. There was John Inman on 'Are You Being Served?', simpering that he was 'free'. There was Larry Grayson puckering his lips as he complained about his friend Everard (the subversive, or anyway vulgar, implications of which were lost on me at the time).

Gay men were camp, sexless, ridiculous. Now all that has changed! Rather than the promotion of homosexuality being outlawed as it was for a while by the Tory government's Clause 28, homosexuality's positive virtues are trumpeted forth in an onslaught of TV shows! It's fabulous!

Indonesian sweatshop worker on the daily grind

The front running candidate in this month's Indonesian Presidential elections, former general Susilo Baubang, may face a run-off election in September. If this so-called "thinking general" wins he will not change the government's commitment to free market economics. The economics which have left 40 million Indonesians unemployed and half of the population of 220 million living on less than US$2 a day.

Nenang works in a factory that makes products for several major sportswear companies. He visited Britain recently*. He described the reality of Indonesian capitalism to Mick Duncan.

"The British are... doing all in their power to foster the Moslem Brotherhood, a clerical-fascist organisation in Egypt... [the Moslem Brotherhood] refused to participate on 21 February, 1946, "Evacuation Day" as this was a real anti-imperialist movement and not a communal one..

The article in Solidarity 3/54, 'Socialist Appeal woos Hugo Chavez' has made me wonder what Workers' Liberty is actually about.


Your article makes Alan Woods sound like a cross between Uriah Heap and Tony Blair. Fortunately for the Marxist movement he is neither of these things. Alan Woods' perspective on this issue is well thought-out and sensible to those of us living in the real world.

By John Cunningham

In 1896 Hungarians celebrated a thousand years of the founding of their nation and Budapest staged a Millennium Exhibition to rival anything seen in Paris or London. As one half of the 18th century Habsburg 'Dual Monarchy', Hungary shared control and administration over the largest dominion in Europe. Eighteen million people lived within the borders of the area controlled by Hungary, almost half of them non-Hungarians. In fact 'Greater Hungary' was an unstable patchwork quilt of nationalities including Northern Romania (Transylvania), Southern Slovakia, Ruthenia,Western Ukraine, Croatia, the Banat, Slovenia, and Northern Serbia (Vojvodinia).

How did the European left fare in the June elections? Martin Thomas reports

The results

Two point six per cent in France, 5.8% in Italy, 8.1% in Denmark, 7% in the Netherlands, 5.2% in Scotland, 4.9% in Portugal... I do not know of any significant radical-left electoral efforts in the new EU member states of Eastern Europe, but in some west European states, at least, there were some scores for the radical left in June's Euro-elections better than those which parties to the left of the Communist and Socialist parties got in the 1970s.

Two of Livingstone's top advisors - Redmond O'Neill and John Ross - are members of Socialist Action (a self-styled Trotskyist group).

By Joan Trevor

"The evil has landed" was the Sun's headline to describe the arrival of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Britain on 5 July. Qaradawi is the spiritual leader of the Egyptian Islamist organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood.

A poll conducted last week by left-leaning German TV magazine Panorama revealed that more than a third of Germans would consider voting for a new left party, made up of expelled and resigned Social-Democrats (SPD) and disappointed former Greens and Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) members. The surprise result has been a nasty shock for the SPD, following a disappointing 22% in the European Union election.

Home Secretary David Blunkett has revived proposals for a Religious Hate law. The government first attempted to introduce a law that would ban inciting religious hatred in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

By Vicki Morris

On 29 June the French parliament voted a change in the status of the public owned national power company EDF-GDF (Electricité de France-Gaz de France). EDF-GDF became a sort of "société anonyme", a joint-stock company, open to 30% private capital.

I read with interest Janine Booth's letter on the International Working Class Association (IWCA) in Solidarity 3/54, and I think she is basically right. However, I would make a couple of points.

The IWCA's success in Oxford has been both unexpected and spectacular. I wonder if the reason they are less electorally successful (although more visible in the community, and probably a lot more popular) in London is that in London their political approach is more honest and consistent.

By Jean Lane

When my daughter was 20 months old, I took her to a parent and toddler group on a nearby estate. The parents sat at one end of the room nattering and gossiping, while a paid, trained worker took the responsibility away from them for a while and provided equipment and company for the kids to play with.

Thomas Carolan continues his series about the history of Irish republicanism

"Ireland occupies a position among the nations of the earth unique… in the possession of what is known as a physical force party - a party, that is to say, whose members are united upon no one point, and agreed upon no single principle, except the use of physical force as the sole means of settling the dispute between the people of this country and the governing power of Great Britain…

By Nick Holden

As the dust settles from the FBU's decision last month to disaffiliate from the Labour Party, union activists continue to prepare for a possible strike over pay, with at least one hand tied behind their backs by their own union leadership.