Solidarity 097, 10 August 2006

End the prison system!

When the Home Office recently (27 July) released its projections for the UK prison population, the Howard League for Penal Reform commented: “The prison population is currently at a record high of 78,500. This is 75% higher than 15 years ago when the population was 45,000. Last Friday there were 4,492 women in prison and 11,490 young men and boys aged under 21.” More than nine million people around the world are in prison. The country that imprisons the most is the USA. According to the World Prison Population List, published each year by the International Centre for Prison Studies, in...

Live dangerous — shop at Marks and Spencers

I don’t want to be a court jew A court jew kneeling before the throne of the idiot anti-zionist The court jew in the palace of the stupid anti-imperialist Martin Buber where are you now You who refused to kneel before the ultimate socialism of fools – anti-semitism. You who abstained from being the house nigger From being an Uncle Tevye I don’t want to shout out “not in my name” (and my name is Y’Israel Zen ben David) Instead I want to scream out “Jews don’t need to disassociate themselves from collective guilt cos there is no collective guilt” I wanna be a dangerous Jew, a frightening Jew, a...

The return of “left” anti-semitism in Poland?

by Piotr Kendziorek and August Grabski, Members of the Revolutionary Left Current Anti-semitism in Poland has not been articulated in the political language of the left since the time of the “anti-Zionist”(in fact: anti-semitic) propaganda campaign of the 1960s inspired by General Moczar, and a later episode of the so-called Patriotic Association ‘Grunwald’ at the beginning of the 1980s. But articles which have recently appeared in the columns of the magazines Lewa Noga and Rewolucja (which are published by the Warsaw publishers Ksiazka i Prasa) give rise to the question of whether the ghost...

Backing John McDonnell

By Sacha Ismail About 400 activists attended the third annual Labour Representation Committee conference in London on 22 July – and voted overwhelmingly to back John McDonnell’s campaign to challenge Gordon Brown for leadership of the Labour Party. Despite the presence of soft left candidate Michael Meacher at the conference, when the CWU’s central London engineering branch proposed a motion of support for McDonnell, there were no speeches and only a handful of votes against. This is not a question of an individual’s self-promotion. With the LRC McDonnell has, far more than any other ‘left’...

Hunger strike at Yarl’s Wood

On 27 July the parents of sixteen families at Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire refused breakfast and refused to send their children to school, starting a hunger strike against the bad treatment of their children. They demanded to be allowed to speak to the Home Office. One of the parents said: “We want the Home Office to hear us and free us”. Another said: “It is like they have put us in a small box, with the intention of forcing us to go back to our countries which are not safe… We are tired of being treated as less than human beings, the ill treatment of our wives and...

Stop Redwatch!

by Charlie Calam In response to the vicious attack on Alec McFadden, President of Merseyside Trades Council, by fascist thugs, Searchlight has launched a call for the Redwatch website to be shut down. McFadden was attacked after his details were published on the site, which hosts the photographs and addresses of ‘Marxists’ (in reality, anyone who does anti-fascist work is a target) alongside incitements to violence. Searchlight estimate that several hundred assaults on left-wing activists can be directly attributed to Redwatch. In the past, calls for violent websites to be shut down have been...

SWP rejects union rank and file

By Tom Unterrainer, Nottingham City NUT In what appears to be a turn to the organised working class, Respect has called a conference on “Organising for Fighting Unions”. Sponsors of the conference include a number of trade union general secretaries and John McDonnell MP, who recently announced his intention to stand for Labour Party leader. Issues up for discussion include the RMT-sponsored Trade Union Freedom Bill, pensions, privatisation and political representation. For today’s labour movement these are central issues — the Trade Union Freedom Bill being a litmus test for the movement and...

Ted Grant

Ted Grant, the last survivor from among the leading figures of the Trotskyist movement of the 1940s, died in July 2006 at the age of 93. For decades he led what became the Militant Tendency in Britain, which in the early 1980s acquired some strength and prominence. At the time of his death he was a member of Socialist Appeal, a group which split off from the main body of ex-Militant people (now Socialist Party) in the early 1990s, to remain active within the Labour Party while the SP broke from it. Some readings on the Grant tendency can be found at: Ted Grant and Marxism as "Prediction"...

Workers Power’s short cuts

Mark Osborn discusses the recent split in Workers Power which was covered in detail in Solidarity 3/96 I suppose the split is no big surprise. For a long time after the invasion of Iraq I had a copy of Workers Power on the wall above my computer. It is the issue from March 2003, following the big Iraq march of February 2003, and the anti-war headlines read: “Global general strike. Blockade the streets. Build social forums to take power”. The editorial claims that blockades of the main roads and motorways, together with a global general strike, of course, would “force the government to sit up...

Dreaming of human liberation

By David Broder A recent exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, Undercover Surrealism, conveyed the redundancy of surrealist art — why would we be “shocked” by works which have been ripped off and imitated by a million ad campaigns? In the wake of World War One, surrealists tried to attack the destructive logic of bourgeois rule, and instead idealised what lay within the human imagination. Nowadays, Surrealism might seem less of a cutting response to bourgeois culture than a rather quaint throwback to an age of pretentious artist-theorists. But there was a time when the leading lights of...

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