Workers' Liberty

By Rosalind Robson

For some months now the Tories and Labour have been trying to win votes by competing to see who can be the most “hardline” against asylum seekeers. More recently the Tories have added gypsies and travellers to their list of “undesirables”.

By John Bloxam

The Respect coalition’s electoral prospects on 5 May are increasingly focussed on George Galloway, who is standing in Bethnal Green and Bow, east London. The electoral “breakthrough” that the Galloway-SWP alliance have been predicting for their “radical fourth party” has now narrowed to getting Galloway, a sitting MP with a high public profile, elected in a seat with a 50% Muslim vote. “Imagine the impact if Respect wins a seat…” (Socialist Worker, 9 April, emphasis added). Respect’s footsoldiers, the SWP have made this seat their priority.

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Members of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) have occupied 12 farms in the state of Pernambuco, to try to pressure the government to speed up land reform. More than 5,000 families from the MST have moved on to the farms.

By Dave Jessop

Six Birmingham Labour councillors have been found guilty of corruption and a systematic attempt to rig the 2004 city council elections.

Dharmananda Panta, chair of a branch of the GEFONT trade union in Nepal, has been imprisoned for 90 days for trade union activity.

Upcoming events include "How fair is Fairtrade?", Central London No Sweat meeting and a visit to the Museum of Childhood. Read on for details.

The Colombian army has assassinated three members of the agricultural workers trade union FENSUAGRO, from the town of San Juan de Sumapaz on the outskirts of the Colombian capital Bogotá.

Around 160,000 members of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions took industrial and protest action on 1 April. Some 120,000 workers at 231 workplaces struck for four hours.

By Colin Foster

According to the Independent, probably the major newspaper most sharply critical of the US/UK military in Iraq, “the tide is turning”.

Patrick Cockburn writes: “American forces are on the retreat throughout Iraq.

London Underground Pension Fund is considering putting up the minimum age for early retirement from 50 to 55, and they are considering other changes, such as abolishing Additional Voluntary Contributions.

By Annie O’Keeffe

The 5 May UK election, which will return 17 Northern Ireland MPs to Westminster, will establish just what impact the months-long campaign by London and Dublin politicians and the media they influence has had on the standing of Sinn Fein with Northern Ireland’s nationalist electorate.

By a civil servant

When PCS, Unison and other public sector unions called off their planned 23 March strike over pensions (and jobs and pay in the case of PCS), Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of PCS claimed “…it is on the basis of meaningful negotiation, in giving people real choices and a real flexibility about their pensions, that the decision to postpone Wednesday’s strike has been taken”.

By a UNISON member

The National Executive Committee elections in Unison are now underway. The left in Unison has been split recently. Last year the Socialist Party walked out of the Unison United Left. In the recent election for the union’s General Secretary current General Secretary Dave Prentis won comfortably, as the left fielded two candidates, Jon Rogers backed by the UUL and Roger Bannister of the SP, who between them managed only a quarter of the vote.

By Jim Denham

The jobs of 6,100 Longbridge workers and of a further 20,000 working for Rover’s suppliers hang in the balance after the collapse of the proposed partnership deal with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC). Longbridge workers are on the payroll, at least until 15 April, thanks to a £6.5 million cash injection from the government.

Unions at the BBC — BECTU, NUJ and Amicus — are set to begin a ballot for strike action over massive cuts at the corporation.

At the beginning of March the BBC Director General announced 2,900 job losses. He also wants a 15% cut in departmental budgets. This will lead, say the unions, to thousands more job losses. Many more BBC programmes are to be “outsourced”, made by outside companies, whole sections of the BBC will be sold off.

The Republic of Ireland, whose main export for decades was meat — people and cattle, the people often enduring travel conditions on cross-Channel boats not much better than those of the cattle — now imports “guest workers”, they in their turn treated not much better than beasts.

Jim Byagua reports on debates in the US trade union movement about the role to be played by restructuring in their revival. The article will have a resonance for trade unionists concerned about the proposed “super union” in the UK.

Pope Idol

Karol Wojtyla, alias John Paul II, supreme caudillo of the Catholic Church, finally popped his clogs last week. He has gone to the great Vatican in the sky to hobnob with the other dead Popes, a pious collection of poisoners, adulterers, thieves, warmongers and dictators. Not to mention the Protestant church leaders — Luther the anti-Semite and Henry Tudor the serial wife-murderer…

Paul Hampton reviews Stop the War: The story of Britain’s biggest mass movement, by Andrew Murray and Lyndsey German Bookmarks £15.99

“What is demagogy? It is a deliberate play with sham values in politics, the dissemination of false promises and the solace of non-existent blessings.” Leon Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification (1937)

By Lynn Ferguson

The recent announcement by Tim Black, Chief Executive of Marie Stopes Clinics, that the organisation supports a reduction in the time limit for abortion to 20 weeks, is yet another example of the crisis of confidence besetting the pro-choice movement.

By Colin Foster

Stay at home and curse at the TV? Go to the polling station and write something left-wing on your ballot paper, in the hope that you get a message across at least to the individual who counts your vote? Vote for the Lib-Dems, on the grounds that at least they criticised the Iraq war, however queasily and weakly, and gains for them will punish Blair?

Josh Robinson reviews “Bullet Boy”

“Bullet Boy” traces the path of Ricky Gordon (rapper Ashley Walters of So Solid Crew) from the day of his release from a young offenders’ institution back into daily life in his Hackney council estate.

I have just read your comments about Galloway and immigration controls (Solidarity 3/69). I’ve just finished writing a book (Deportation Is Freedom!) comparing controls to the regime in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. This also takes up Galloway’s position. Hopefully it develops the debate. Here is the relevant extract.

Steve Cohen

Around 300 travellers (mostly Roma gypsies) marched through London's West End on 9 April in protest at the mounting number of evictions from traveller sites. The march followed a church service remembering the victims of the porrajmos (the Holocaust), and of more recent ethnic cleansings and pogroms across Europe.

At the count after the 2001 general election, Nottingham East Labour MP and government whip John Heppell gave over much of his victory speech to denouncing his socialist challenger Pete Radcliff. Not, unfortunately, that Pete Radcliff had come near to defeating Heppell and winning the seat — but Heppell was evidently aware that the socialist campaign had bitten into the core of previously committed Labour supporters, and did not know how to answer its arguments.

The question of the socialist attitude to religion is now assuming an importance it has not had in most of our lives for many decades. This is in part because of the self-gutting of large swathes of the pseudo-left, in a vain effort to make itself acceptable to reactionary and even quasi-fascist political Islam, which the pseudo-left in its ideological poverty, identifies as “anti-imperialist”.

Dan Katz reads “The Buenos Aires Quintet” by Manuel Vazquez Montalban and “Little Scarlet” by Walter Mosley

I seem to have been reading crime and noir endlessly, book after book, for years. That’s what it feels like — and God have I read some crap.

Israeli socialist and peace activist Uri Avnery comments here on recent demonstrations against Mubarak in Egypt and on the growth of Islamism in the Middle East. The demonstrations have been severely repressed. That is bad, but it is also worrying that the forces that are initiating the demonstrations are growing. How should socialists face up to this reality?

On 7 April Kevin Curran resigned as General Secretary of the GMB union, to be replaced as acting General Secretary by the man whom he defeated in the election for the job two years, Paul Kenny.