Workers' Liberty

The hope that the 'big four' trade unions - TGWU, Amicus, GMB, and Unison - were on a direct collision course with the Blair Labour Party was knocked back at the 23-25 July meeting of New Labour's National Policy Forum discussing the manifesto for the next general election.

By Sacha Ismail

How seriously does the British left take fighting fascism? Very seriously, if the energy devoted by the SWP et al to respectable liberal causes like Unite Against Fascism is anything to go by. Less seriously, if the recent National Front demo in Trafalgar Square is the standard of measure.

By Bruce Robinson

'Victory to the Intifada', a campaign dominated by the Revolutionary Communist Group, has held a picket outside Marks & Spencer in Manchester for more than three years calling for a boycott of the store and more generally of Israeli goods. The picket has recently come under attack from two directions.

By Sam Ruby

New Labour, after much lobbying, and despite the recommendations of a Commons Select Committee, has refused to introduce legislation compelling local councils to provide official sites for gypsies and travellers.

By Dan Katz

Michael Howard has attempted to create space between New Labour and the Tories on crime by promising a prison building programme, even greater numbers in jail, more police stop-and-search and less police "red tape".

Former stable lad Damien Connor has been convicted of assaulting the trainer who had sacked him, Marcus Tregoning. Connor, a TGWU member, believes that he was sacked for trying to represent the interests of fellow stable lads.

The G8 Summit of World Leaders meets in July 2005 in Scotland. A campaign has started to get the world's leaders to put Fair Trade on the summit's agenda and tackle global poverty.

A target of 1,000,000 names by June 2005 has been set. And the organisers want to highlight the following facts:

By Mark Osborn

On 11 June the Dominican Republic clothing giant Grupo M dismissed almost one-third of the 800 or so workers at its two Haiti factories in the CODEVI Free Trade Zone (FTZ), located outside of Ouanaminthe on the Haitian-Dominican border.

By Jean Lane

No Sweat was once more at the Tolpuddle Festival this year. Organised by the South West TUC, this is the annual celebration of the men who fought to set up a trade union, in their a tiny Dorset village in 1830.

More than 50 protesters demonstrated outside Levi's flagship store in Central London last week.

The participants were from the Haiti workers' support group, No Sweat and the GMB union.

They were campaigning on behalf of the sacked workers who make Levi jeans in Haiti.

By Vicki Morris

On 25 August many Parisians will mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the capital, a significant moment in the defeat of the Axis Powers in the Second World War.

On 25 August 1944, overwhelmingly, Parisians cheered the arrival into Paris of the French 2nd Armoured Division in the vanguard of the Allied forces.

In late July, police in Beijing expelled from the capital around 80 laid-off workers from one of China's largest military-industrial complexes, who were demanding their jobs back.

The workers, sacked by the Inner Mongolia North Heavy Industries Group Corp. Ltd. (NORHEINCO), had been petitioning the central government.

The trade deal struck by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) last week is "a blueprint for deeper trade liberalisation that will not deliver poverty reduction to the poorest countries," according to the World Development Movement (WDM).

By Max Lane

On 22 July, more than 300 people gathered in Jakarta to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Democratic Party (PRD).

Nazi thugs gain

Any thoughts that the BNP might be in retreat should be completely dismissed. In a Dagenham council by-election on 15 July the BNP got 31% of the vote.

This gave them more than the Tories, Lib-Dems and Greens put together.

By Sean Matgamna

Paul Foot, who has died at the age of 66, was one of Britain's best known socialists.

A member of what is now the SWP for 43 years, he became widely known for "muckraking" books about miscarriages of justice such as Who Killed Hanratty (1971), for his association with Private Eye, and for his columns in the Daily Mirror and the Guardian.

Earlier this year the Metropolitan Police announced a re-examination of more than 100 murders in England and Wales which, they suspect, have been 'honour killings'. Cathy Nugent looks at this chilling phenomenon, and reviews a new novel which examines the effects of honour killing on a Pakistani community.

Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers is a skilful evocation of the lives of a Pakistani immigrant community in a northern English town at the end of the 1990s.

This is the kind of "deprived community" Robin Cook has recently been touring in an effort to convince Muslims that New Labour really has done something for the poor. That claim is not convincing.

Certainly this town - which the original migrant community renamed Dasht-e-Tanhaii, to mean "The Wilderness of Loneliness" or "The Desert of Solitude" - is a very desolate place.

Every day the smooth-faced pundits forecast on the box.

The miners' strike is lost, they say, and Scargill's on the rocks
Lies, defamation, misinformation, this is the testing time
He kept faith with the men who elected him, and that is a major crime.
The Media, Ewan McColl

By Mick Duncan

Beginning August: After South Wales NUM is fined £50,000 the NUM calls on the TUC and the rest of the trade union movement for solidarity action. Nothing happens. The movement begins to go into retreat, although the miners would remain, fundamentally, solid until November.

At the recent conference of the Transport and Communication Workers' Union, affiliated to the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), delegates unanimously passed a motion instructing the newly elected union leadership to reclaim the union's Baghdad office building closed since 6 December 2003 by an act of illegal aggression by troops of the occupation authority.

Organising, growing, campaigning

By Martin Thomas

By Martin Thomas

In Baghdad, the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions has marched successfully to reoccupy the offices from which they were evicted by a US army raid in December last year.

By Clive Bradley

The worst fighting since May has erupted across Iraq, with the collapse of the ceasefire with the so-called Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

David Bacon describes the development of the Iraqi workers' movement

Labour activity has, since a year ago, spread from Baghdad to the Kurdish north, with the centre of the storm in the south, in the oil and electrical installations around Basra, and the port of Um Qasr.

US Labor Against The War convenor visits UK

Gene Bruskin is the co-convenor of US Labor Against the War (USLAW), a trade union-based anti-war campaign which since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been building solidarity with the new Iraqi workers' movement. He spoke to Martin Thomas and Sacha Ismail during his tour of the UK at the start of August.

Colin Foster reviews The Other American: the life of Michael Harrington by Maurice Isserman

This book has some interesting things to teach us about how socialists operate, both in times of adversity and in times of opportunity.

Dan Nichols reviews 'Bad Lads Army', Thursday nights ITV1

'Bad Lads Army' is the follow-up to 'Lads Army', a 2002 programme which put a group of young men through 1950s-style National Service training.

Jenny Lindsey reviews 'Shrek 2', written and directed by Andrew Adamson

Call me a sucker, but I enjoyed this sequel. It takes the piss out of beautiful and it takes the piss out of cool. So, I'm predisposed to like it.

'Shrek' and 'Shrek 2' take old fairy tales and turn them on their head. The ogre wins against Prince Charming. The Fairy Godmother is a scheming, no-good witch (with the persona as well as the voice of Jennifer Saunders). Sleeping Beauty is not impressed with cool, smooth-talking men, oh, and she's a karate black belt. The Gingerbread Man doesn't run away, but comes back fighting. Puss-in-Boots is a hired hit man.

Annie O'Keefe reviews 'Who you callin' a nigger?'

Darcus Howe (Channel 4, Monday 9 August) explored the growing hostilities in Britain between Pakistanis and West Indians and between Somalis and West Indians, between groups of 'black' people, towards all of whom white racists have an identical attitude of hostility.

Letter from Martin Thomas, Islington

Pete Radcliff (Solidarity 3/55) is right, I think, that Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 911 is much better cinema than his previous Bowling for Columbine.