Solidarity 071, 14 April 2005

By Annie O’Keeffe The 5 May UK election, which will return 17 Northern Ireland MPs to Westminster, will establish just what impact the months-long campaign by London and Dublin politicians and the media they influence has had on the standing of Sinn Fein with Northern Ireland’s nationalist electorate. >The 5 May election will in Northern Ireland be not one but two more or less entirely separate elections, one among nationalists in which Sinn Fein will compete with the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), and one among unionists in which Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) will...

By a civil servant When PCS, Unison and other public sector unions called off their planned 23 March strike over pensions (and jobs and pay in the case of PCS), Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of PCS claimed “…it is on the basis of meaningful negotiation, in giving people real choices and a real flexibility about their pensions, that the decision to postpone Wednesday’s strike has been taken”. However, New Labour has given no sign of granting any such thing. Even worse, it is now clear that the PCS leadership had not even truly “suspended” the industrial action but called it off...

By a UNISON member The National Executive Committee elections in Unison are now underway. The left in Unison has been split recently. Last year the Socialist Party walked out of the Unison United Left. In the recent election for the union’s General Secretary current General Secretary Dave Prentis won comfortably, as the left fielded two candidates, Jon Rogers backed by the UUL and Roger Bannister of the SP, who between them managed only a quarter of the vote. In these NEC elections, the two left camps have managed to avoid standing candidates against each other, but more by default than design...

By Jim Denham The jobs of 6,100 Longbridge workers and of a further 20,000 working for Rover’s suppliers hang in the balance after the collapse of the proposed partnership deal with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC). Longbridge workers are on the payroll, at least until 15 April, thanks to a £6.5 million cash injection from the government. Everyone was counting on the Chinese deal for investment that would allow the company to develop new models and give it a chance of survival. Now, it has been placed in the hands of administrators. It is possible that SAIC or some other...

Unions at the BBC — BECTU, NUJ and Amicus — are set to begin a ballot for strike action over massive cuts at the corporation. At the beginning of March the BBC Director General announced 2,900 job losses. He also wants a 15% cut in departmental budgets. This will lead, say the unions, to thousands more job losses. Many more BBC programmes are to be “outsourced”, made by outside companies, whole sections of the BBC will be sold off. This is, according to National Union of Journalists General Secretary Jeremy Dear, not just a union issue, but one of general public concern. “Quality will suffer...

The Republic of Ireland, whose main export for decades was meat — people and cattle, the people often enduring travel conditions on cross-Channel boats not much better than those of the cattle — now imports “guest workers”, they in their turn treated not much better than beasts. On 12 April Turkish construction workers demonstrated in front of the Dáil [Irish Parliament] to call for shorter hours of work, better inspections of workplaces by state labour inspectors, and guarantees that they will receive all their wages. The 250 Turkish workers on the demonstration had been working for as much...

Jim Byagua reports on debates in the US trade union movement about the role to be played by restructuring in their revival. The article will have a resonance for trade unionists concerned about the proposed “super union” in the UK. Union membership [in the US] has fallen to 12.5% nationally, and to 7.9% in the private sector, leading to proposals to restructure and revitalise the US labour movement. This is in the run-up to the convention of the US union federation AFL-CIO in July, and to the vote for President of the AFL-CIO. This debate — a debate about the future of unions in the US — is...

“What is demagogy? It is a deliberate play with sham values in politics, the dissemination of false promises and the solace of non-existent blessings.” Leon Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsification (1937) The history of the movement against the war in Iraq has yet to be written. No doubt an enterprising student somewhere is already busy reconstructing the story of how it happened and why. Such an account would be extremely valuable, given the numbers that have been involved and the movement’s continuing impact on national and international politics. This book will add little to such an...

By Lynn Ferguson The recent announcement by Tim Black, Chief Executive of Marie Stopes Clinics, that the organisation supports a reduction in the time limit for abortion to 20 weeks, is yet another example of the crisis of confidence besetting the pro-choice movement. If the largest provider of abortion services in the UK cannot bring itself to speak up in defence of existing abortion rights, then it seems the battle might be lost before it has even begun. Over the last year or so there has been a drip feeding to the press of exceptional abortion “horror stories” seemingly calculated to whip...

By Colin Foster Stay at home and curse at the TV? Go to the polling station and write something left-wing on your ballot paper, in the hope that you get a message across at least to the individual who counts your vote? Vote for the Lib-Dems, on the grounds that at least they criticised the Iraq war, however queasily and weakly, and gains for them will punish Blair? Do any of those, and you’re just giving another turn of the wheel to the political processes which have brought us to the current low point of working-class electoral choice in Britain. We cannot raise ourselves up from that low...