Workers' Liberty

The SWP isn’t keen on systematic discussion of ideas — but on the few occasions when its publications do make a nod towards theory, they tend to rely on a small number of well-worn quotations.

Prêcheurs de Haine (Preachers of Hatred), by Pierre-André Taguieff, is a large scale, French-language study of “left-wing” “judeophobia”.

by rhodri evans

The Government is on the road to converting the Health Service from a provider of health care into an insurance system.

American socialist Barry Finger argues the case for calling for “troops out now” in iraq

The Workers’ Liberty dayschools on “Marxists and the trade unions”, on Saturday 1 October were held simultaneously in Sheffield and London.

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty met with representatives of the Socialist Party, the Alliance for Green Socialism, and the Socialist Alliance (Provisional) for a Socialist Green Unity Coalition committee meeting on 2 October.

Ruben Lomas reviews Green Street

Michael Wood reviews Land of the living Dead

Laura Schwartz reviews Martin Scorsese’s film about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, BBC2

No Direction Home was not about Dylan the man or Dylan the musician, but Dylan the icon. In telling the story of how Bob Dylan came to acquire and ultimately to reject the title of “voice of a generation”, Scorsese also treats him as a symbol — as an embodiment of the tension between art and politics.

THEIR DISASTER RELIEF, AND OURS

The gross neglect and incompetence with which the US government responded to the New Orleans disaster is now well known.

Many British labour movement activists and leaders were hostile to Solidarnosc — most prominently miners’ leader Arthur Scargill. Scargill was — and still is — a Stalinist who believed that police-state Poland was a genuine socialist country. Like many militants, Scargill’s views were reinforced because the Cold War leaders of the Eastern Bloc were in a head-to-head stand off with his own immediate enemies — Margaret Thatcher and the hated US president Ronald Reagan. Large sections of the left and some on the right of the labour movement made the elementary mistake of assuming that their enemy’s enemy was a friend.

A quarter of a century ago, Poland’s Stalinist police-state system was rocked by a massive wave of working-class action.

By Daniel Randall, NUS National Executive (personal capacity)

The entire National Union of Students has been put to shame by one tiny students’ union, on one tiny site, of one university in Devon.

The Portman Group — a group set up by the brewers to promote “sensible drinking” — has recently produced a report highlighting the high rate of sexual assaults on young women after they get drunk. The report’s conclusion is, not to ask why men continue to sexually assault women, but that women should stop putting themselves at risk.

By David Broder

The recent media furore over the “revelation” that Kate Moss uses cocaine is a cynical bid to undermine the model’s career and a show of totally feigned “moral outrage” at her behaviour.

By Martin Thomas

“If you belong to a church, that would help. Or there are private schools, if you can pay…”, said the helpful lady from the Citizens’ Advice Bureau.

I was phoning about difficulties getting my daughters into school. Not into a particular school, just into any school at all.

A letter from Venezuela by Alex hammond

Upon arriving in Caracas last month I have found myself encountering many Venezuelan bourgeois who have come across hard times since the rise of the new order.

By Maria Exall, CWU

Tensions between the Labour Party leaders and the trade unions are being forced centre stage by events.

At this year’s Labour Party Conference at Brighton the main affiliated trade unions came out pretty solidly in opposition to Blair and Brown, defeating the government on a range of important questions.

By harry glass

China’s forced-march industrialisation continues apace. The OECD, the rich nations’ think tank, says that by 2010 it will become the fourth largest economy in world — overtaking Britain, France and Italy.

Earlier this year four of the United States’ biggest unions — SEIU service employees, UFCW food and commercial workers, UNITE HERE textile, hospitality and retail workers and the Teamsters — split from the AFL-CIO, the country’s trade union federation. Together with other smaller unions, they have formed a new coalition called “Change to Win”, with a founding conference at the end of September.

By Peter Burton

I spent three interesting months in the US between April and the end of June this year. I was last there in 1992. Post 9/11 there are a lot more American flags around on houses, buses, trains etc. Airline workers have suffered in the fallout. One pilot I spoke to told me he had taken a $ 75,000 pay cut last year, the justification being less people travelling post 9/11. He told me “Retirement could not come quick enough for the older pilots”.

The fourth European Social Forum (ESF) will take place in Athens on 6-9 April 2006. The ESF has come a long way since the first, chaotic event in Florence in 2002, and the Athens event will be big, vibrant and inspiring. Vicki Morris asks what more we should be getting out of the ESF

DWP jobs strike: why more delay?

By a PCS Socialist Caucus member in London

On 21 September, members of the PCS civil service union in the Department of Work and Pensions in London voted by a three-to-one margin for strike action against the Government's plans for job cuts.

by a unison member

The Government, via the local government employers, has put down its new proposals for cutting local government pensions.

By Joan Trevor

On 4 October all the main national trade union federations in France called a joint day of strikes and demonstrations. The first reports suggest that this has been well supported by workers — including many non-union members.

By Alan Porter

Under a deal negotiated by the TGWU — and announced to the press before consulting its members — just 187 of 713 workers sacked by Gate Gourmet the airline catering company based at Heathrow, back in August will be reinstated.

The political sage and religious thinker Sinead O’Connor has recently had the grace — or the urgent need of publicity for a new album — to describe her pro-Provisional IRA politics of the 1990s, not elegantly but accurately, as “bollocks”.

David Broder takes a strongly critical view on Die Linke.PDS

Most of the British left responded with uncritical celebration to the German Left Party’s strong election results. While it cannot be doubted that their tally of 8.7% of votes was a huge achievement, we also need to examine whether we actually call for a vote for such a group.

Walter Wolfgang, the Richmond constituency Labour Party delegate who was thrown out of Labour Party conference by stewards for shouting “Nonsense!” when Jack Straw spoke about Iraq, and was then initially refused readmittance to the conference by police citing anti-terrorist legislation, spoke to Solidarity.