Solidarity 071, 14 April 2005

Privatisation of health by stealth

By Stan Crooke New Labour’s sustained attacks on the NHS are the most graphic illustration of their promotion of a big business agenda and their abandonment of basic labour movement values. When the NHS was created in 1948 it was based on the simple idea that health was a right, not something to be bought or sold. Its basic principles were comprehensiveness (meeting all medical needs), universality (covering all parts of the country), and equal access (irrespective of income). Some compromises were made at the time of its creation — hospital consultants were allowed to continue with their...

Qaradawi and Ken Livingstone’s dodgy dossier

Ken Livingstone's office has produced a document defending his invitation to the Muslim cleric Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi to City Hall in July 2004. Al-Qaradawi is a leading spokesperson of the Muslim Brotherhood. According to a briefing written by gay activist group Outrage, using the words of Qaradawi himself, the Livingstone dossier includes factually untrue claims in defence of Dr al-Qaradawi. From Outrage’s briefing: The Mayor claims Dr al-Qaradawi is one of the Muslim scholars who have done the most to combat socially regressive interpretations of Islam on issues such as women’s rights. Dr al...

What is secularism?

Throughout the world, political religion or religious politics is being revived. In the United States Christian fundamentalists want to end the traditional separation of church and state. These fundamentalists have mass support. In the Middle East and North Africa Muslim “fundamentalism” is also strong. Often known as political Islam, this movement varies in nature from country to country. “Islamists” always aim to set up what they would term authentic “Islamic states”. They want society to be organised according to the principles of a dogmatic and sometimes cruel reading of Islam. Britain is...

A real rise of anti-semitism

On the final day of NUS conference, the two Union of Jewish Students members on NUS national executive, Luciana Berger and Mitch Simmons, resigned in protest at the NUS leadership’s failure to stand up to growing anti-semitism in the student movement. In addition to the Executive’s lack of response to a variety of anti-semitic comments and incidents over the last year, they might also have cited the political capitulation in search of votes, by NUS President Kat Fletcher and her allies to the MAB-supporting leadership of FOSIS. Yet their resignation statement met with scoffs from all parts of...

Pakistani women organise

On 11 April a group of women organised a demonstration outside Pakistan’s national parliament. They were protesting against a violent attack on female runners a week earlier. On 3 April groups of Pakistani Islamists threw petrol bombs near to a mini-marathon involving women runners. Feminist activists and democrats in Pakistan are increasingly dismayed by the government's inability and unwillingness to deal with violence and intimidation by the Islamists. Pakistan’s government is controlled by its President, General Pervez Musharraf The actual head of government, the Prime Minister, is a close...

Letter to a student SWP member: Why are you joining the reactionaries?

Dear comrade, On 7 April, at this year’s National Union of Students conference, Socialist Worker Student Society members, in alliance with the Islamist-dominated Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), organised a walkout in protest at the speech given by the Iraqi socialist, Houzan Mahmoud, who had been invited to conference as a guest speaker. At the same conference, numerous right-wing speeches by Blairites, Tories and others were met not with walkouts but properly with debate. What must this woman have done to inspire such hostility amongst sections of the student left? Is she one...

Against the boycott of Israel

As democrats, socialists, advocates of Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, and supporters of the right of the Palestinian people to an independent state of their own, alongside Israel, we call on British academics to reject the moves for a renewed academic boycott of Israel due to be debated at the council of the Association of University Teachers on 20 April. We urge them to consider the arguments against the boycott from Israeli academics who criticise and oppose Israeli government policy. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University, for example, has pointed out the inconsistent...

Stop the rise of the religious right

By Sacha Ismail Events at National Union of Students Conference, which took place in Blackpool between April 5 and 7, should sound the alarm for socialists in the student movement and beyond. The deterioration of NUS’s political culture is gathering pace, with the leadership and sections of the left facilitating the rise of right-wing forces that previously had no presence in the student movement. The Islamist-led Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) was strong enough to conclude alliances not just with the SWP and others on the “anti-imperialist” far left, but with large swathes of...

The anti-imperialism of fools

The Labour Party Pakistan (LPP) has produce a withering attack on the fake “anti-imperialism” of Islamist forces across the globe. An article by Farooq Sulehria contains a sharp rejection of these forces. Although we disagree with the LPP’s views on some other “anti-imperialists” discussed in the article, we welcome their honest and uncompromising stance. Anti-imperialism is freedom, for all oppressed, from all oppression. In contrast, an Osama bin Laden, or Ayatollah Khomeini for that matter, offers an anti-imperialism that does not tolerate these values. Theirs is an anti-imperialism that...

Organising in the maquilas

Evangelina Argueta comes from the Central General de Trabajadores in Honduras and co-ordinates a project to organise the workers in the maquilas — factories which assemble goods for export. The maquilas are found in Mexico and Central America. They offer cheap labour, few labour or environmental regulations and low taxes. Products include clothes, electronic products and car parts. In Honduras 127,000 workers are employed in this sector.

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