Solidarity 113, 7 June 2007

Resolution 54 to Unison’s national delegate conference (June 19-22) calls for the union to support a campaign to boycott (undefined) Israeli institutions. Workers’ Liberty supporters are working with others in Unison to oppose this resolution on the basis of positive solidarity with the Palestinians. If you would like to support this statement, please email links.not.boycott@gmail.com with your name, branch and position (all signatories will be listed in a personal capacity unless specifically requested). AS democrats, socialists, critics of the policies and actions of the Israeli government...

THE Executive of the public services Unison has rejected a proposal from the relevant union committee to give money to the international trade-union news website Labourstart, on the grounds that one of the people involved in running Labourstart is a “Zionist”. It is a sort of “boycott before the boycott”, a pre-emptive application of motion 54 to Unison conference, which proposes a boycott of all Israeli institutions. Labourstart provides an unparalleled breadth of information on workers’ struggles and workers’ organisations worldwide, including in the Occupied Territories. At the Executive no...

By Mark Osborn, the delegate who moved the left anti-boycott motion at UCU conference THE new University and College Union (UCU), formed from the merger of AUT and NATFHE, met in conference for the first time at the end of May. The media covered the conference extensively – mainly because of an SWP motion, submitted through Brighton University by one of their people, Tom Hickey, which called for a discussion about a boycott of Israeli academia. The motion passed despite the formal disapproval of both leading factions inside the bureaucracy (Sally Hunt, new leader of UCU comes from the AUT’s...

By Amina Saddiq Two days before Solidarity went to press, on 6 June, police in the South African city of Durban attacked nurses picketing their hospital as part of a national public sector strike over pay with plastic bullets and stun grenades. Several strikers were injured and twenty arrested. On Friday 1 June, nearly half a million workers, including large numbers of nurses, teachers, civil servants and local government employees, struck to demand a 12% pay rise. The government, which has just given senior officials an increase of 30%, offered only 6% — an insult when South Africa’s...

Venezuela By Milton D Lein of the Juventud de Izquierda Revolucionaria group in Venezuela In recent speeches [Venezuelan president Hugo] Chávez has sharply attacked the autonomy of the trade unions with respect to the government and the state. “The trade unions should not be autonomous... that has to be done away with‚” he stated. This hostile rhetoric comes as Chávez calls for the construction of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and is directed against the proposal of trade-union autonomy made by various union leaders, among them the class struggle current C-CURA, led by Orlando...

By Stan Crooke Russia’s President Putin has threatened to target Russian nuclear missiles at European countries in response to American plans to deploy interceptor rockets in Poland and a radar base in the Czech Republic. According to the US authorities, the bases in Poland and the Czech Republic are not aimed at Russia. Instead, they claim, the purpose of the bases is to provide protection against ballistic missiles which might, in future years, be fired by Iran or North Korea. According to Putin, the real target of the bases is Russia. In an interview in the run-up to the G8 summit in...

A delegation from the AWL attended the annual fete of the French Trotskyist organisation Lutte Ouvriere on 26-28 May. This fete, held near Paris, a tradition for over 30 years now, attracts around 20,000 people each year. Some 200 stalls offer food, drink, games, and information, plus music, dancing, and forums for political debate. A report by Martin Thomas can be found at www.workersliberty.org/node/8565. The extract below is about a debate between LO and other big Trotskyist group in France, the LCR. ... The LCR is buoyant. Despite a general squeeze on the activist left in this year’s...

By Helen Shaw ON 16 May, 30 students and “Open Borders” campaigners protested against David Coleman, professor of demography at Oxford, speaking at a conference at Manchester University. Last year Coleman was the subject of a campaign by Oxford students on the grounds of his membership of the council of anti-immigration campaign Migration Watch and his long-standing connection with the Galton Institute, going back to the days when it called itself the Eugenics Society. This met with a storm of indignation from the Mail and Telegraph — who like to quote Migration Watch in their anti-migrant...

Paul Hampton reports on the AWL 2007 annual conference Anyone wondering why AWL members are combative with those we disagree with in the left and the labour movement might be surprised at the way we argue with each other — it’s even sharper. The culture of the AWL is to fight for clarity in our ideas, to tell the truth and to call things by their right names. It is a culture of debate we want in our press, in our public meetings, and of course in our annual conference. Marx warned that the ruling ideas of the epoch are those of the ruling class. Lenin followed Engels in defining the...

18th century England was populated by a large number of Protestant sects. They formed a colourful underground scene outside the official Anglican church with secret meetings, conscientious reading of the Scriptures, feverish searching for the purest teaching, collective ecstasies and awakenings, charismatic wandering preachers, rousing pamphlets, internal disputes, expulsions, splits, new foundings, conversions, attempts at reunification and more of the same. These currents can be traced back to the previous wave of social struggles, which had shaken the country in the 17th century. The actors...