Solidarity 196, 9 March 2011

The Camp for Climate Action, a network of direct-action environmentalists, whose main activity has been to organise a series of annual protest camps between 2006-2010, has dissolved itself. I was involved with the network for most of that time. The 2007 Climate Camp at the site of the proposed third runway at Heathrow airport was the first political activity I got seriously involved in. I already thought of myself as a socialist and had read a couple of things. Growing up and going to school and college where I did had given me an embryonic understanding of class, and racism. But it was all...

To commemorate international women’s day in Liverpool, a statue has been put up on St George’s Plateau of Mary Bamber. Mary was a supporter of the Russian revolution and a founding member of the Communist Party — when it was a revolutionary organisation. A socialist, an organiser of working-class women, a supporter of the 1911 transport strike, and on the Bloody Sunday march in that dispute. She was a comrade of Sylvia Pankhurst — who broke with the right-wing suffragettes. In 1920, she attended the Second Congress of the Third International in Moscow. She was a local committee member on the...

I had resolved to avoid reading the Guardian on Tuesday 8 March. I knew they would be publishing a “100 most inspiring women list” on this, the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. And I had no desire to revisit the taste of my breakfast on my way into work. The list had been trailed in the paper some weeks before and promised to include Margaret Thatcher, Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton. Hence the anticipation of nausea. In the event, the list was not as bad as I expected, just boring and predictable. And the Guardian did not bother to enquire about or explain the origins of this...

Extracts from an interview with Kamal Abou Aita, President of the Real Estate Tax Authority Union (RETA), the first independent union in Egypt, established in 2009. How did you feel during the initial days of the revolution? I had a feeling of indescribable joy at seeing my lifelong dream coming true. To see Egyptians taking to the streets en masse, it was a moment of incredible joy. How do you explain such a massive mobilisation within such a short space of time? The young people managed to mobilise huge numbers of people. At the same time, since 2006, workers had started strike movements...

The labour movement is facing the most generalised attack on the working class in 20 years. Ministers and officials are routinely monitoring the union response and actively planning to defeat any resistance. If the unions do not respond with deep and extensive industrial action and a political alternative, then wages will be slashed, and everyone’s “social wage” of public services and benefits will be hollowed out and recast as a private-sector, parasitic, business opportunity. Without industrial action and a political alternative, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost. Unions will be...

Last week I was arrested and charged for confronting a group of people who were sieg-heiling and using racist language towards a group of friends and anti-cuts students. Their behaviour included telling an Asian and a mixed-race woman to “look in the mirror to see how inferior you are”. The police turned up at the altercation. They were uninterested in the racism and abuse, and instead pushed a Jewish woman in our group who was remonstrating with the police about doing nothing. The man responsible for most of the abuse was told to “move along”. I raised my voice in a futile attempt to make the...

On 2 March Hackney council passed its budget. As in other boroughs local activists demonstrated against the meeting. The road outside the town hall was blockaded and activists inside chanted slogans at councillors, disrupting the meeting at one point, before agreeing to let it continue. I was glad to be there. That said, more would have been possible if Hackney Alliance activists had developed a plan to disrupt the meeting. We have since learned that the Lambeth Town Hall occupation was the product of a lot of preparation (see Solidarity 195). In Hackney, and I’m sure elsewhere, there is a...

Hugh Edwards ( Solidarity 3-194) criticises Silvio Berlusconi’s appointment of “prostitutes” to public office. It is not a term that I favour: many feminists now prefer to say “sex workers”, reflecting that the women in question are workers, and we should relate to them as such. More broadly, in deciding an attitude towards Berlusconi’s current travails, two comparisons are instructive. First, yes, Berlusconi has been thoroughly sexist in his approach to ministerial selections. But for many years the British Conservative Party, albeit in a different way, was also notoriously sexist in its...

Paul Hampton ( Solidarity 194) seems (it is not totally clear) to oppose any constituency link when electing MPs on the grounds that it produces a result that is not exactly proportional to the votes cast for each party nationally. That is wrong. Abolition of constituencies would mean that MPs would just be chosen from national party lists, putting more power into the hands of central party bureaucracies (and we already have some idea of what that means in the Labour Party!). It also removes any accountability of MPs to their electorate or to local party members. Finally, it robs constituents...

Rupert Murdoch has won his bid to increase News International’s share of BSkyB from 39% to 61%. An alliance of media organisations including the Guardian , Telegraph , Daily Mail , Mirror and BT had demanded the bid be referred to the Competition Commission. Labour had said they wanted that too. As did the ex- Media and Culture Secretary, Vince Cable. Even Tory James Hunt, who replaced Cable in that post, was promising to refer the decision right up to the last minute. Despite all this, Hunt permitted the takeover in return for a promise by News International to let go of the loss-making Sky...