Solidarity 071, 14 April 2005

Josh Robinson reviews “Bullet Boy” “Bullet Boy” traces the path of Ricky Gordon (rapper Ashley Walters of So Solid Crew) from the day of his release from a young offenders’ institution back into daily life in his Hackney council estate. The film follows his attempt to escape the pointless spiral of violence and retaliation, and the gradual but perhaps avoidable involvement in this cycle of his 12-year-old brother, Curtis (Luke Fraser). The film’s violence is shocking because it is so closely connected to the most inane details of everyday life. There is no gang-culture, no drug-dealing, no...

I have just read your comments about Galloway and immigration controls (Solidarity 3/69). I’ve just finished writing a book (Deportation Is Freedom!) comparing controls to the regime in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. This also takes up Galloway’s position. Hopefully it develops the debate. Here is the relevant extract. Steve Cohen Farhat Khan would be at risk of deportation as a failed asylum-seeker whatever government was in power. But there is perhaps something doubly depressing in the fact that it is a Labour government which has put her under threat. There was one moment in time when...

Around 300 travellers (mostly Roma gypsies) marched through London's West End on 9 April in protest at the mounting number of evictions from traveller sites. The march followed a church service remembering the victims of the porrajmos (the Holocaust), and of more recent ethnic cleansings and pogroms across Europe. Many gypsies and travellers are being turfed off land which they own. Councils do this because, they say, travellers are flouting planning regulations. Yet many councils have made it very difficult for travellers to comply with planning regulations. Overall councils are not providing...

At the count after the 2001 general election, Nottingham East Labour MP and government whip John Heppell gave over much of his victory speech to denouncing his socialist challenger Pete Radcliff. Not, unfortunately, that Pete Radcliff had come near to defeating Heppell and winning the seat — but Heppell was evidently aware that the socialist campaign had bitten into the core of previously committed Labour supporters, and did not know how to answer its arguments. Heppell is heading for a similar experience at this general election. Challenged to debate, he responds: “No, you’re all nutters”. He...

Introduction The question of the socialist attitude to religion is now assuming an importance it has not had in most of our lives for many decades. This is in part because of the self-gutting of large swathes of the pseudo-left, in a vain effort to make itself acceptable to reactionary and even quasi-fascist political Islam, which the pseudo-left in its ideological poverty, identifies as “anti-imperialist”. There are, of course, elements of a criticism of capitalism in some of the things said by the political Islamists. However, what they counterpose to it, a society ruled by medieval Islamic...

Dan Katz reads “The Buenos Aires Quintet” by Manuel Vazquez Montalban and “Little Scarlet” by Walter Mosley I seem to have been reading crime and noir endlessly, book after book, for years. That’s what it feels like — and God have I read some crap. Villains from south London, investigators from Manchester, cops from Leeds. Even a half-wit from Nottingham (whose author — conspicuously unable to write well — adopts an old trick to give his character a certain melancholy and bleak depth: the man listens to jazz! Apparently liking jazz conveys all the above without the need to write words which...

Israeli socialist and peace activist Uri Avnery comments here on recent demonstrations against Mubarak in Egypt and on the growth of Islamism in the Middle East. The demonstrations have been severely repressed. That is bad, but it is also worrying that the forces that are initiating the demonstrations are growing. How should socialists face up to this reality? The Western (and, of course, Israeli) media publish enthusiastic reports about the demonstrations for democracy and against the regime of Husni Mubarak. Some of the demonstrators are leftists, but most of them are Islamic militants and...

On 7 April Kevin Curran resigned as General Secretary of the GMB union, to be replaced as acting General Secretary by the man whom he defeated in the election for the job two years, Paul Kenny. Curran had been suspended as General Secretary on allegations of misdeeds in the election. Now a joint statement by him and the union says that he leaves with “his reputation and integrity intact… Each party has agreed to keep the terms of the settlement confidential. Neither party will be making any further statement”. A union activist comments on the background to these moves: The key issue in the GMB...

By Mike Rowley What the country’s poorest really need is higher house prices. That’s the basic premise of the Government’s Housing Renewal Pathfinder schemes — demolishing 400,000 houses across the north of England to build more expensive homes. “The aim of this £500 million housing market renewal programme is to turn whole communities around by improving the quality of private, local authority and registered social landlord housing. This will involve clearing poor quality houses… building attractive, good quality new homes, and upgrading existing homes to push up their market value.” (Office...

I sometimes think that Maria Exall and I are the only Christians who support AWL. The valid points made in the article (Solidarity 3/70) headed “Keep religion out of politics!” were undermined by the headline, which could have come from the Daily Mail. All religions are bound to be political, especially when they claim not to be — “non-political Christians” invariably turn out to be conservatives, and support the status quo. Churches are often attacked for not taking political issues seriously, and then attacked again when they do. The key issue is exactly how religion and politics connect...