Workers' Liberty

By David Broder

Bourgeois opinion was shocked on 1 May when new Bolivian president announced that he was going to nationalise the country’s gas resources. Troops were sent to occupy refineries and installations where the hydrocarbons are extracted as Evo Morales decreed, “The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources”.

By Paul Hampton

Iraq has a new prime minister and the prospect of a new government after months of deadlock, but paralysis and sectarianism continues.

On 22 April, Nouri (Jawad) al-Maliki, a Shia and member of the Dawa Islamist party was appointed prime minister. He has 30 days to form a government and then parliament must approve each member of his cabinet by a majority vote.

May Day rallies in Tehran and Sanandaj were attacked by the Iranian security forces, with 17 demonstrators, including members of the executive board of Tehran bus workers’ union, arrested.

Cassius: Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge leggs, and peep about...

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,

That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I Scene III.

AFTER the big Labour losses and Tory gains in last week’s local elections, there is a louder-then-ever clamour in the labour movement and beyond it for Blair to go, and go soon. But Blair refuses! He will, he says, go in his own good time.

AT this year’s Communication Workers’ Union conference, delegates will have an opportunity to lay down a marker for the next Labour Party leadership election. A motion proposed by London and Manchester branches calls for the CWU to “only nominate, support or encourage members to vote for candidates in the next Labour Party leadership election who support the principles of Trade Union Rights as outlined in the proposed Trade Union Freedom Bill and are also committed to keeping the Post Office in 100% public ownership”. It also calls for CWU-sponsored MPs to nominate a candidate who meets this criteria.

By John Bloxam

DESPITE losing seats, New Labour retained control of Tower Hamlets Council on 4 May, winning 26 seats and a bare majority of the total 51.

Significantly, many of the cabinet members most closely associated with the Tory policies pursued by the previous New Labour administration were defeated – notably the Council leader and lead member for Housing.

By Daniel Randall, national union of students executive

MY Labour Students colleagues on the NUS National Executive Committee (along with several of the “Independents”) spent much of their time during the local election campaigns in Tower Hamlets, trying to stop Respect from getting elected. Fair enough - Blairite activists will campaign for Blairite candidates, although why they thought fighting Respect in Tower Hamlets was a more important use of their time than fighting the BNP in Barking and Dagenham is somewhat beyond me.

Janine Booth and Charlie MacDonald, Workers' Liberty members standing as Socialist Unity candidates in Hackney Central ward on 4 May, received 260 and 161 votes - roughly 11% and 7%, depending on how you calculate it in a three-seat ward. Despite a doubling of the Tory vote on the back of the national Tory revival, Janine beat all three Tory candidates. She received almost the same vote as in 2002, when she won 271 votes as a Socialist Alliance candidate.

by Colin Foster

THE election-figures expert John Curtice reckons that the 4 May local government poll outcome “was not a disaster for Labour” (Independent, 6 May).

by Sofie Buckland, National Union of Students executive member-EleCt

LECTURERS’ unions AUT and NATFHE are continuing their dispute over pay, demanding a decent national pay offer despite attempts by university bosses to defuse the dispute through local deals and drawn out national negotiations.

by Mike Southerden

ROYAL Mail's latest drive to slash jobs is continuing apace, but is meeting with rank and file resistance in some areas.

By Maria Exall, CWU Executive

AT this year's Communication Workers’ Union conference (Bournemouth, from 21 May), there is an issue that will not go away - the proposed privatisation of Royal Mail in the form of share options for staff.

Charlie McDonald, Public and Commercial Services union DWP Group Executive (personal capacity)

TENS of thousands of Public and Commercial Services union members in the government’s biggest department, Work and Pensions, struck on 2 and 3 May against Gordon Brown’s job cuts.

By a rail worker

THE biggest rail strike for eighty years moved a step closer at the start of May with the unions setting a date for balloting workers across the industry. RMT, ASLEF, TSSA and engineering union CSEU gave notice of the strike ballot after the employers failed to agree the unions' four-point plan to avert a pensions crisis.

Indonesia

A wave of protests — including on May Day — by Indonesian workers has forced the government to put off its draft labour law.

By Reshma Stephens

The revolt of the Nepalese people against their country’s autocratic monarchy demands our support and solidarity. The mass strikes and demonstrations which forced king Gyanendra to restore parliamentary government last month are the classic forms of a deep popular revolution, with neither the ruling class able to maintain the old system of domination any longer nor the ruled willing to tolerate it.

The BNP “won” its first seat on Birmingham City Council due to a mistake which led to tellers counting BNP votes twice in Kingstanding ward.

By Dave Landau

In most parts of the country the BNP’s results are disappointing (for them). For all their efforts in the West Midlands — where they put up 86 candidates — they had a small handful of gains.

By Mike Rowley

Detainees at Colnbrook maximum security removal centre have alleged racist abuse against hunger-striking detainees by private security guards.

By Jim Byagua

In another show of strength, the opposition to proposed immigration legislation was powerfully demonstrated in many cities across the US on May Day. The “Day without Immigrants”, included a national boycott, strike, and student walkout, and was organized on 1 May to emphasise the role played within the US economy by immigrants. With more than a million people across the nation marching for immigrant workers’ rights, May Day has been reclaimed.

Fascism — rampant, unashamedly racist and would-be pogromist fascism — is now stronger than it has been in Britain since the 1970s. In the number of council seats held by the fascists, it is stronger now than in the 1970s.

By Thomas Carolan

After his mid-day meal Trotsky would “Relax on the sofa for an hour or two, and there… take a nap or… read for relaxation some German or Russian or French literature… novels sent to him by friends in France, some new editions of Sigmund Freud, whom he read very extensively and whom he admired enormously. I noticed that he would mark off and annotate page after page of Freud during this siesta period, and after an hour or two would resume work at his desk…”

By a NATFHE member

On 27-29 May, the lecturers’ union NATFHE will meet in Blackpool for its last conference before merger with another lecturers’ union, AUT, to form the “Universities and College Union”, UCU.

A new attempt is being made to set up a movement in Britain to support the Palestinian Arabs by organising a boycott of Israeli goods on sale here.

By Amina Saddiq

EVEN given the number of academics and journalists on its supporters list, the “liberal left” Euston Manifesto has received a remarkable amount of press coverage. The latest is an article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the 10 May Guardian, arguing that the Eustonites should endorse a new era of “progressive” imperialism and colonialism to bring democracy to the world.

By Martin Thomas

Now it’s the Ségo-Sarko show. As if the three months of mass mobilisation which forced France’s right-wing government to withdraw the CPE (its measure to remove all job security for young workers) were just a bad dream, official French politics has turned to speculation about the presidential elections due in 2007 and the front-runners to be candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy for the right (UMP) and Ségolène Royal for the ‘left’ (Socialist Party).

Four members of the AWL attended this year’s European Social Forum in Athens, held from 3 to 7 May. Although the huge venue made the size of the event difficult to estimate, it seemed smaller than previous Forums. That perhaps reflects the relative cost of getting to Athens, and the size of the Greek left.

At the start of April, Iraqi police dragged out 14 year old Ahmed Khalil and executed him on his family’s doorstep.

Campaigners against the deportation of Iraqi asylum seekers recently received the following information from a ministerial answer to a parliamentary question by Labour MP Neil Gerrard:

THE Blair government’s obsession with “vocational education” — which is actually just training for the McJobs that the working-class kids who take it will have to get when they leave college — took an entertaining new turn recently when Britain was announced as the host of the 2011 ‘World Skills Games.’