Solidarity 240, 28 March 2012

Tories will use army to break oil strike

Over 60% of oil tanker drivers working for seven major firms have voted to take strike action in a national ballot organised by Unite. Drivers at Turners (94% in favour on a turnout of 82%), Norbert Dentressangle (75%, 71%), Wincanton (68%, 72%), BP (60%, 86%), and Hoyer (60%, 80%) will all strike. DHL drivers voted to take action short of a strike, and drivers at Suckling voted against any industrial action. The ballot is part of an ongoing campaign by Unite on myriad issues within the oil haulage industry, including health and safety, casualisation and pensions. The campaign’s key demand is...

Sri Lanka: why war crimes went unchecked

This film is the follow-up to Channel 4’s 2011 documentary cataloguing the final year of the civil war in Sri Lanka. This latest documentary recaps the investigations and describes the world’s response — or lack of it. Macrae interviewed David Miliband, then UK Foreign Secretary, and John Holmes, a British diplomat who was UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs. The evidence, both from Tamils who suffered and members of the Sri Lankan army that were involved, is damning. The Sri Lankan army deliberately targeted civilian targets, and they used co-ordinates from humanitarian...

Demonstrations after Toulouse

The Toulouse killer who shot dead three Jewish children, a Jewish teacher and three soldiers of North African and Caribbean origin, was Mohammed Merah, a Toulouse mechanic, who was inspired by far-right Islamist ideas. In a stand-off with the police which ended in his death, Merah claimed to be a supporter of Al-Qaeda and said that he was acting to avenge “Palestinian children”. Shortly after Merah’s death, silent marches and rallies took place around France to commemorate his victims. In Toulouse, 6,000 people rallied to hear speeches, led by the Socialist Party mayor of Toulouse, the Jewish...

Will the far left learn from the Toulouse murders?

On 19 March, Mohammed Merah, a French citizen of Algerian descent and a self-described member of al Qaeda, killed three Jewish children and an adult at a Jewish school in Toulouse; the previous week he had shot dead three French soldiers of North African origin. At first the killer’s identity was not known. On 22 March Merah was tracked down by French police and shot dead. Yves Coleman, of the journal Ni patrie, ni frontières, discusses and criticises the reaction of the left to Merah’s killings. Anti-semitism and anti-Judaism have a long history in France. Pogroms happened around the first...

Coal miner's daughter fights the Empire

The Hunger Games looks like being the next huge teenage film franchise based on a book series to follow in the footsteps of Harry Potter and Twilight. There is also something in it for adults. The Hunger Games is set in an apocalyptic future where 12 districts are ruled over by the imperial Capitol following a crushed uprising. As punishment for the rebellion, each district is forced, each year, to offer two teenagers, chosen by lot, as tributes to fight to the death in the Hunger Games in front of an avid television audience in the Capitol. “Hunger”, because starving families in the districts...

Sites of struggle: organising in construction

On 4 March 2012, the long-held suspicions of hundreds of trade union activists in the construction industry were confirmed when it was revealed that the British state had been colluding with construction contractors to prevent union activists from getting work. The “Consulting Association” (CA), a shadowy body funded by most major construction contractors, held data on numerous individuals which included information that could not have come from anywhere except police records. The CA has also been revealed to be holding an “RMT file”, suggesting that the extent of their data collection could...

Save the NHS! Block the sell-off law!

More than 80 NHS campaigners met on 21 March at the Unite union offices in London, on the initiative of Health Alarm, to discuss coordination for the defence of the NHS after the Health and Social Care Bill passed through Parliament on 20 March. Speakers included Wendy Savage from Keep Our NHS Public (KONP) and Helen McFarlane from Unite. Campaigner after campaigner spoke of their determination to continue the fight to save the NHS. A recurring demand was for a national demonstration in defence of the NHS: the day before, 20 March, the Unite executive had resolved to call on the TUC to...

Vote Labour, expel Livingstone

Two bottom lines: vote Labour. And expel Livingstone from the Labour Party. If poor Eric Joyce can be expelled simply for getting pissed and punching a few Tories, then surely Livingstone’s blatant anti-semitism should be sufficient to get him booted out. I’ve campaigned and voted for candidates as bad as Livingstone before: Liam Byrne for one. Voting Labour is a class duty, not a petty bourgeois choice. But that doesn’t mean we have to tolerate whatever the Party machine serves up. Miliband’s defence of Livingstone is disgraceful. Livingstone must be expelled. But until he is, we must...

PCS verbiage

The PCS union Executive’s statement on why it was overruling the 73% vote from PCS members for a further strike on 28 March against the Government’s pension changes promised instead a hope of “industrial action... before the end of April”. Leave aside, for now, the substance of the matter, and consider only the language. We know that the PCS leaders are promising, or suggesting, that PCS members will strike for one day in late April. Yet the statement never uses the verb “strike”. Instead it speaks always of “taking strike action”, or “taking industrial action”. This usage has become common in...

“Ethnic” block-voters?

In his letter giving his recollections of the debate around the (successful) attempt to ban the Sunderland Polytechnic Jewish Society in the 1980s ( Solidarity 238), Brian Plainer highlights the “natural bias” of “500-600 mostly overseas Arab/Islamic students”, which he believes represented “a significant block vote in favour of banning the Jewish Society”. Brian is on thin ice here. Lazy assumptions about the “natural biases” of a given ethnic, cultural or national group also made up part of the thinking of the “Jew = Zionist = supporter of Israeli government policy” equations in the heads of...

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