Workers' Liberty

By Sean Matgamna

“They take each other by the hand today, but they will take each other by the throat, tomorrow,” we said not long ago, commenting on the United Front of Christian, Muslim and Sikh zealots to repress “disrespectful” comments on their respective religions.

By Sean Matgamna

Of course you know the story. A man is in the market place, and he sees Death, and Death looks at him intently, recognising him.

Labour Party conference featured plenty of fringe meetings such as Kraft Foods making the case for Dairylea to be included in school meals, tobacco companies telling delegates to remember that “smokers are voters too”, and BUPA setting the agenda for how to improve healthcare standards. But away from the lobbyists and spin doctors, outside the ring of checkpoints, barriers and hundreds of armed police, was an alternative fringe. David Broder reports.

The BBC’s programme Shoot the Messenger caused a bit of a furore. When I sat down to watch it I was already aware that its working title had been Fuck Black People. To say the least I felt somewhat uncomfortable, not least because this a story about a black IT worker whose idealism leads him to become a teacher — which is also a remarkably accurate description of me (though my idealism is of a different brand). Although I didn’t get to relax during the course of the programme, the nature of my discomfort changed.

By Colin Foster

From the Blairites, and from further to the right, we hear more and more about “restoring discipline” and “restoring old-fashioned standards” in schools.

The real chaos generated in some schools by social decay and by incessant “restructuring” from above is being used as a springboard for the re-imposition of more punitive, authoritarian regimes in schools.

“Power to the people” is the unlikely new slogan of New Labour, of Gordon Brown and his supposed “Blairite” rivals alike.

Brown himself impressed the Guardian’s political editor, Patrick Wintour, with “the scale of [his] plans to shift power away from politicians” (Guardian, 25 September).

By a Labour Party Conference delegate

DESPITE the bureaucratic exclusion, for the first time ever, of a majority of resolutions from Constituency Labour Parties, this year’s Labour Party conference has surpassed last year’s record by inflicting five significant defeats on the government.

Faryal Velmi reports on the Grunwick commemoration event held by Brent Trades Council on 17 September.

Having admitted eight former Stalinist states in central and Eastern Europe, as well as Malta and Cyprus, to enlarge to 25 countries in 2004, the EU will admit Romania and Bulgaria in January 2007. However, Romanian and Bulgarian workers will be denied the right to migrate to Britain, with New Labour ministers arguing for “managed migration” and “gradual access”, which could mean controls for up to seven years.

OVER 18 months after Coventry City Council voted to break off negotiations with Unison over the imposed Single Status ‘deal’, the union looks set to add to the three days of strike action which it has already taken to defend members’ wages. In the face of the Tory-controlled council's attempts to use anti-union legislation and its team of solicitors in the High Court, the union ballot unanimously endorsed selective strike action.

This explanation by HW Benson of the relationship of the working class to democracy and the fight to widen, expand and defend democracy, appeared 50 years ago in the American socialist weekly Labour Action. It was a time in the USA when socialists and even liberals were under tremendous pressure from the anti-communist “McCarthyite” witch hunts. We too live in a time when democratic liberties are under attack. We must resist this attack, as Labour Action and The Militant, the two US Trotskyist papers of the time, did, alongside others.

By Martin Thomas

For the first time since early 2005, there are the beginnings of a workers’ upsurge in Iraq. According to the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions, several groups of workers have taken action in a wave of the successful strikes over wages and conditions by southern oil workers on 22 August.

By Cathy Nugent

THE Islamist military dictatorship in Sudan has launched the second stage of the civil war in Darfur. They want to put down the groups which refused to sign a ceasefire and political agreement in May of this year. If they do not stop this assault, thousands of civilians will be persecuted and killed. In mid-September the UN reported government arial bombardments in the north of the region. They expect thousands of people to be displaced. Those people fear the campaign of terror which has always followed such bombardments, when government-backed militia has gone into villages to raze them to the ground and sexually assault the women there.

By Jim Denham

The Morning Star is the daily publication of the British Stalinist “left”. Prior to the collapse of the USSR and the Stalinist empire in 1989/90, it was subsidised by “Moscow gold”. Since then it's been subsidised by the dues of rank-and-file union members, most of whom are completely unaware that their hard-earned wages are being used to finance the last gasp of Stalinism in Britain.

By AWL health workers

In a magnificent show of defiance over the last two weeks, hundreds of NHS workers in the supply service NHS Logistics have taken the first national strike action in the NHS for 18 years. The one-day strikes mark an end to the “phony war” between the unions and the Government over NHS privatisation, and could spark a national fightback against the selling off of the NHS.

By Elaine Jones, Dumfries SSP

The SSP is holding its conference on 7-8 October at Glasgow Caledonian University. This is the chance for the SSP to discuss the way forward after the split with Tommy Sheridan and the SWP. There are some important lessons to learn.

The Manchester Labour Party conference reveals an entity that goes through the motions of being a political party, that retains the structures of a party, annual conferences for example, but whose structures no longer perform the essential functions which gave rise to them.