Workers' Liberty

By Lynne Moffat. Solidarity 3/6, 30 April 2002.

by Gerry Byrne

It seems almost flavour of the month. Everyone is declaring for a Workers Party. But it could have two distinct meanings, and it’s important to distinguish the two and work out what is the relation between them.

It is with great sadness that we report the unexpected death of Rob Howard-Perkins. Rob died in December following a short illness. He was 35.

Rob joined the civil service after leaving school in 1987, working at Stepney and then City Social Security offices. He joined the union immediately and it was not long before he was playing an active role in CPSA Hackney and Tower Hamlets branch. Rob also served on the CPSA DHSS Section Executive Committee and was a member of both Socialist Caucus and the Broad Left. Outside the Civil Service Rob was active in the Labour Party, Socialist Organiser and several anti racist campaigns.

The Workers' Party in power

Swiss socialist Charles-Andre Udry, in an article from late December 2002, looks at the prospects for the Lula government

In the last issue of Solidarity Chris Jones, former Merseyside FBU brigade chair and a member of the Revolutionary Democratic Group, looked at the background to the dispute. In this article he analyses the politics of the dispute. The article was written before the FBU suspended their strike action

David Osler visited Saudi Arabia recently and looks at the Orwellian picture behind 'our friends in the Midle East'

George Orwell himself probably could not have thought up a name as archetypically Orwellian as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. But that is the name the police go by in Saudi Arabia, and their control of public space is almost total. Riyadh is what the fictional 1984 looks like in the actual 2002.

By Michaela Collins

The first World Social Forum was called, in January 2001, to coincide with the World Economic Forum, which was taking place in the luxury Swiss resort of Davos.

The WEF is essentially the representatives of global capitalism deciding among themselves how to run the world smoothly in their own interests.

Michaela Collins continues her analysis of 'social forums' by looking at the European Social Forum and how it differs from the World Social Forum

In Solidarity 3/14, I looked at the origins of the World Social Forum, which has met twice in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The WSF, I concluded:

• is anti-neoliberal rather than anti-capitalist;
• blurs class contradictions in a north/south, developed/developing world dichotomy;
  
  

From Solidarity 3/4, 29 March 2002

By Sean Matgamna

The House of Commons is a strange place, governed by its own sometimes incomprehensible rituals.

In the early 1990s the Unionist MP Ian Paisley was suspended from the House for shouting "liar" at a minister who denied that the government was having secret talks with Gerry Adams and the IRA. Everybody knew that what Paisley said was true: secret talks - ultimately they led to the Good Friday Agreement - were taking place and those who denied it were, indeed, liars.

From Solidarity 3/14, 11 October 2002

Canterbury Coalition Against War brought three coachloads of people to the demonstration against war on Iraq on 28 September - people aged from 15 to 86, students, firefighters, other workers, pensioners...

From Solidarity 3/14, 11 October 2002
Before the Labour Party conference last week in Blackpool, the Labour leadership was assiduously briefing the media to tell them that "Labour Party conference no longer decides party policy".

From Solidarity 3/14, 11 October 2002
"We support in principle the single European currency. We are Europeans and internationalists", says Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS civil service union and the most prominent trade-unionist in the Socialist Alliance.

From Solidarity 3/14, 11 October 2002
Joining up with fascists? No socialist would ever want to do that. Yet on 28 September the Stop The War Coalition, a coalition led by socialists, did something very close to that.

We need a political crusade on public services
By Alison Brown
(written before Labour conference, in defiance of the leadership, voted for an independent review of PFI)

At the TUC's conference last month several of the new left-wing union leaders and many other union members besides made unusually outspoken criticisms of New Labour in government. Now the unions look set to repeat their challenge to New Labour at the Party's conference which starts on Sunday 29 September.

Questions and answers on the Middle East
Sean Matgamna


Right now, what are the most important political points about the Middle East conflict for socialists in Britain?

• To back Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation of the lands where they live. To demand Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. To support those in Israel who oppose the occupation, and those who refuse to serve in the Israeli army in the Occupied Territories.
• To demand justice for the Palestinian nation - their immediate right to set up an independent Palestinian state, side by side with Israel, and the provision of sufficient compensation and aid to allow the Palestinians, who now live in Third World conditions side by side with First World Israel, a chance to develop their society.
• To argue for an overall settlement, a "historic compromise", between the surrounding Arab world and Israel.
• To champion Jewish and Arab working-class unity in the area, on the only possible basis, namely, mutual recognition of both nations' rights.
  
• To argue in the labour movement and the left for historical understanding and an international socialist approach to the question. To reject and oppose both Jewish and Arab chauvinist approaches to the conflict. To counter the vicarious Arab chauvinism dominant on the British left (and not-so-left). To combat the demonisation of Israel as a uniquely bad and vicious state that expresses that Arab chauvinism and the traditional European hostility to Jews.

• To fight anti-semitism, which finds "respectable" expression under cover of that Israelophobia.

From School Teachers Opposed to Performance Pay (STOPP)


Education Secretary Estelle Morris has signalled the Government's intention to try and shatter the national pay structure for teachers.

By Nicole Ashford

On 8 September, 15 people died in fighting in the Afghan city of Khost. Precisely why they died is not clear. We do know the fighting had to do with a dispute involving a local warlord, Padshah Khan Zadran. One report suggests he feels aggrieved that he did not receive sufficient credit for his role in bringing down the Taliban.

The Indonesian regime and the military have drastically stepped up the repression in Aceh.

The chair of the Acehnese Popular Democratic Resistance Front (FPDRA) has been abducted, probably by the military. The military have also scooped up 200 people in a raid.

Paul Hampton looks at the TUC's report Globalisation: Myths and Realities


This report seeks to give a labour movement perspective on the question, but misses the whole point about a working-class response to globalisation.

By Janine Booth - From Solidarity 3/14, 11 October 2002

I live in a SureStart pilot area. SureStart is a government project to help children younger than four years old. But for many parents, kids and workers, it has been a frustrating experience.

By Martin Thomas
Many socialists unsure on the euro say that the question for them is whether it is possible to make an internationalist campaign for "no to the euro" sufficiently strong that it will become not just a quirky adjunct to the Murdoch/Tory "no" campaign.

Starve or accept GM blackmail

Fourteen million people are now facing starvation in southern Africa, according to new United Nations figures. The organisation had previously put the number at 12.8 million. In Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique, droughts and floods - combined with political crisis in Zimbabwe in particular - have led to disaster. The impact of the crisis is made worse by the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the region. The UN has so far received only a third of the aid it says is needed.

In Zambia opposition to genetically-modified food has led to the government rejecting donations of corn from the USA because it might be GM.

You probably wouldn't expect Miss World contestants to be leading the way in fighting for women's rights. But already seven beauty queens have announced that they will boycott this year's Miss World contest, due to be held in Nigeria in November, in protest at the sentence of death by stoning handed down to single mother Amina Lawal ) under sharia law.

• Scandal of East End Sweatshops
  By Jean Lane

• Indonesia: embassy protest
• Nike's naked greed exposed!

The Government is planning a new crackdown on unemployed people.

The details of the proposals, described by Gordon Brown as "new rights matched by new responsibilities", have yet to be revealed. The drive is aimed at people who are, in the Government's view, "persistent offenders" - that is the long-term unemployed, many of whom are, apparently, failing to go on the Government's New Deal.

Unions must take up rural issues

Over 400,000 people joined the Countryside Alliance march through London on Sunday 22 September. But what did they want? Most were against a ban foxhunting, but beyond that?

Time to organise the solidarity

• Jane Clarke, an FBU activist in Bedfordshire, spoke to Solidarity

• What do firefighters want?

The union is ballotting its members from 27 September. The question on the ballot paper is: "Are you prepared to take discontinuous strike action?" I expect a very high yes vote.

• 40,000 march in Cologne for free education

• Join the Student Campaign Forum!
• Get involved in the UK protests

By Faz Velmi (NUS national executive) and Sacha Ismail

• The truth about Saddam. Cathy Nugent looked at Labour Against the War's 'counter-dossier' produced in advance of the Government's dossier on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction

• Labour Against the War
• How do we stop Blair's war drive?
  By Gerry Byrne

• Frontline Poetry: Phrase Book
• Defend Iraqi Kurds and Iranian asylum seekers

By a tube worker

In a ballot of RMT members on the London Underground 80% of tube workers who took part voted for strike action over pay.


During recent pay negotiations the management offered 3.2%, which the union rejected. The management then imposed a smaller increase of just 3%. Underground workers were furious at both the meagre amount of extra cash and also the calculated snub the management have made to the workers and the union. The union wants a 5.7% increase.