Workers' Liberty

By John O’Mahony

A. For socialists in Britain, what are the most important political issues in relation to the situation in the Middle East after the Israeli-Hizbullah war?

By Paul Hampton

Students and workers have taken to the streets of Bangkok in protest at the military coup on 19 September, despite universal indifference from “democratic” bourgeois governments around the world.

By Stan Crooke

In May 2004 ten more states joined the European Union. Eight of these were the so-called “A8” states from ex-Stalinist Eastern Europe. Since then, around 470,000 workers from the A8 states have entered the UK workforce.

by Colin Foster

On 29 August, oil pipeline workers in Basra and in Nassiriyah, in southern Iraq, announced victory in their 48-hour strike of 22-23 August, which stopped oil supplies from the south to central Iraq.

The biggest privatisation so far of any part of the NHS is now underway.

The Blair government intends to transfer £3.5 billion worth of contracts from the publicly owned NHS Logistics, which organises the provision of half a million product lines, to DHL, a privately-owned German distribution company.

By Elaine Jones, Dumfries and Galloway SSP

Saturday 2 September saw the launch of Tommy Sheridan’s new organisation Solidarity — Scotland’s Socialist Movement (sic). This new organisation has been set up not because of serious political differences, but because of personal differences over Tommy’s court case, in which he successfully sued the News of the World.

We oppose the government’s decision to make the possession of so-called “violent porn” an offence.

Fighting is intensifying in Darfur, the western province of Sudan. The conflict began in 2003. Rebel groups demanding more autonomy for the area began attacking government targets. And the the Islamist-military government launched a brutal military campaign flanked by pro-government militias, the janjaweed.

By Joan Trevor
The French media, apparently, is dumbing down, becoming more like the US and UK, an obsession with celebrity and image — the French call this “pipolisation” — is growing.

by Nick Holden

“The government will today announce completion of the NHS’s biggest ever privatisation”, (Guardian 5 September).

Tube drivers on the Jubilee Line are to be balloted for industrial action because of the unbelievably unfair sacking of a colleague.

A pensioner in Langwith, Derbyshire, has won a victory for public accountability in the NHS. At an appeal against the award of a local GP contract to United Heath Care, the local Primary Care Trust was found to have been guilty of not consulting local people.

The first week of September saw an escalation in the long-running dispute between cleaners, porters and switchboard workers and their private employers Rentokil Initial at Whipps Cross Hospital in Leytonstone, East London.

Secretaries at the Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham staged a protest last week against proposed job cuts. As part of a plan to merge the cities two hospitals 1,184 staff will be made redundant, including 120 administrators.

By Sofie Buckland, NUS National Executive Committee and Education Not for Sale

Most academic staff believe that university top-up fees will be £5,000 within three years, according to recent research by the University of Southampton. This is not an unreasonable prediction — unless students fight back.

For centuries Lebanon, like all the Arab world, was part of the Ottoman empire, governed from Constantinople. But like another mountainous area of that empire, Kurdistan, it kept itself a bit apart.

By Dan Katz

Palestinian Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh says a deal to form a Palestinian national government is close. That government will be led by Hamas, which has a parliamentary majority, with the nationalist Fatah organisation as a junior partner.

Why is there any need to publish a memoir of the Holocaust? Who but a few on the fringes of society deny the genocide happened? The reason to publish is because a significant section of the left has twisted its solidarity with the oppressed into de facto support for organisations who deny that the Holocaust happened.

By Peter Tatchell, OUTRAGE!

Parts of Iraq, including some Baghdad neighbourhoods, are now under the de facto control of Taliban-style fundamentalist militias.

On 5 September the Campaign to Stop Deportations to Iraq held a successful lobby of the Home Office Headquarters in Marsham Street, London.

AWL women are supporting Feminist Fightback, an activist conference for women’s liberation that will take place on Saturday 21 October in London.

20 young AWL members and sympathisers went to the Reading and Leeds music festivals over the August bank holiday weekend this year...to pull pints.

By Sacha Ismail

The 2 September issue of Socialist Worker contains a lengthy article by Anindya Bhattacharyya attacking the use of the term “Islamofascism” to describe Islamist movements like Hizbollah.

Fifty years ago this year, in 1956, perhaps the greatest technological revolution of the 20th century started. It was much more prosaic, “low-tech”, and distant from advanced scientific discoveries than the innovations with computers and microelectronics, but has arguably had a greater social and economic impact.

“The only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce.”

James Connolly

It is twenty years since the final collapse of the left-wing Liverpool Labour council of 1983-6.

Through that council, the avowedly Marxist “Militant Tendency” had the leadership of a mass workers’ movement which could have shaken or defeated the government. Arguably it marked the highest point ever (so far) of active mass influence for would-be revolutionary Marxists in Britain, higher than anything achieved by the Communist Party when it was a revolutionary party in the 1920s.

May 83 Labour makes gains in elections for one-third of Liverpool City Council’s seats and wins the Council from the Liberals (who have controlled it since 1973). Militant supporters are central in the new council Labour group.

Martin Thomas reviews In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, by Nir Rosen.

Bruce Robinson reviews Circular Breathing: The cultural politics of Jazz in Britain by George McKay.