Solidarity 239, 21 March 2012

According to the latest opinion poll in Greece, on 15 March, the two main parties in Greece, the ones which European Union leaders hope will form a new coalition after the election due in late April or early May, stand at 23% (New Democracy) and 13.5% (Pasok). In the last two years they have lost half the support they had in the last parliamentary elections, in October 2009. In recent weeks people turning away from ND and Pasok have begun to cluster, not yet around the revolutionary left, but around the reformist left that has opposed the bailout “memorandum” cuts packages. In the 15 March...

Former Greek finance minister Evangelos Venizelos has been elected leader of Pasok and announced the start of a campaign for the general election due in late April or early May. Venizelos joined Pasok in the dark years of 1989. He was not part of the progressive left wing forces that emerged from the battle against the junta (1967-74) and formed Pasok as a vibrant movement, breaking from the Centre Party. He was active in the Macedonia naming dispute of the early 1990s, when the darkest forces in Greece opposed the use of the name “Macedonia” by the newly independent neighbouring Republic of...

To turn round the public sector pensions campaign now will need not much less than a miracle. Activists will work for that near-miracle: to make the London strike by teachers and lecturers on 28 March so strong that it bounces the National Union of Teachers (NUT), at its 6-10 April conference, into organising an escalating series of regional strikes, and forces the leaders of the PCS civil service union, at last, after three months of prevarication, into calling strikes. Even if the London teachers’ and lecturers’ strike cannot rise above the scale of a token protest, still, a token protest is...

Britain’s roads are crumbling. But David Cameron has a brilliant idea to fix that. He will get his mates in the city to compete to lease the most popular roads; they’ll fill in the pot holes and, as is only fair, in return, they will get to levy tolls. Whether it’s VirginHighways, Serco or Balfour Beatty that gets the lease to the M25 etc, imagine what the less busy roads are going to look like in ten years time? And that’s why the AWL is saving up to buy a donkey and cart. Actually we need money to continue fighting Tory stupidities. Publishing Solidarity as a weekly, maintaining our website...

More confident now that even the unions which reject the public sector pensions deal have relegated further national strikes to an undefined possibility in late April, chancellor George Osborne may cut income tax for incomes over £150,000 in the Budget on 21 March. Only a short time ago, even the Tories thought it too risky, politically, to cut the 50% marginal rate at time when poverty is increasing for the majority of the population at a rate outstripping the Thatcher era, while the ultra-rich are doing well and inequality is increasing sharply. Especially risky at a time when tax credits...

The diversification of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group seems to know no bounds. He’s already done planes, trains, record companies and a bank. He now thinks that healthcare is the logical next step. What motivates him? A deep-seated desire to deliver high quality health care, or a deep-seated desire to further line his and his shareholders’ pockets? Virgin now owns the majority share in Assura Medical, which is bidding to run frontline children’s services across the whole of Devon. This would include community children’s nursing, health visiting, child and adolescent mental health services and...

A Tory councillor in Redbridge recently described calls to limit tweeting in Town Hall meetings as “Stalinist”. It’s amazing what you can learn from the Ilford Recorder, I guess. When words are commonly used with that degree of hyperbole, you know that the concept has become virtually meaningless in the public mind. Yet according to the home page of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty website, the AWL’s raison d’etre is to create a socialist alternative to “both capitalism and Stalinism”. At first reading, terminology like that seems wilfully anachronistic, and perhaps a throwback to the days...

This March marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Bayard Rustin, the American civil rights leader who passed away in 1987. Rustin is remembered as the organiser of the great 1963 March on Washington at which Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech. But to socialists, Rustin’s legacy is richer than that. I first met Rustin some 40 years ago when he agreed to co-chair the Socialist Party together with Michael Harrington and a long-forgotten Jewish trade union leader named Charles Zimmerman. Rustin was at that time already unfashionable on the left because of his strong...

The government has launched a consultation on marriage reforms, which would allow gay couples in England and Wales to enter into civil marriage. We have already witnessed an unrestrained fit of homophobia from many religious leaders and anti-gay groups, including the Coalition for Marriage. They say same-sex couples may choose to have a civil partnership but no one has the right to redefine marriage for “the rest of us”— presumably those who support the existing patriarchal concepts of marriage and sexuality. The key proposals of the consultation are: • to enable same-sex couples to have a...

Last year Education Minister Michael Gove rushed through legislation which allows him to force schools to become academies against their wishes. Now hundreds of primary schools which are not achieving Gove’s “floor targets” in Year 6 SATs are under threat of being taken out of the democratic control of local authorities, and put into the hands of private sponsors regardless of the opinions of staff, parents and governors. Schools are being told: capitulate and hand over their school to the private sector, or democratically elected governing bodies will be disbanded and heads told to clear...