Solidarity 242, 18 April 2012

Different “lefts” in France’s election

The first round of the French presidential elections is on 22 April, with the run-off between the top two candidates on 6 May. The latest opinion polls put right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy, Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), on 26-27% and François Hollande, candidate of the Socialist Party (PS, similar to the British Labour Party), on 28%-30%. These will almost certainly be the top two candidates in the run-off. Here, Hollande is a full 10% ahead of Sarkozy in the polls. Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the fascist Front National (FN — National Front) has also been polling well. A debate...

An appeal to the NPA: don't split!

For the French Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (New Anti-capitalist Party — NPA), and the ex-LCR (Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire) core of the NPA, to split now would be a great setback not only for activists in France but for all of us who fight for working-class self-emancipation, all across Europe. Reports from France point to a “cold split” already, and an open split after the legislative assembly elections in June. At the end of March, tensions exploded in a public battle over who would get the government subsidy due to the heirs of the LCR, under French law, on the basis of the LCR’s...

Greece: defy election blackmail!

The Greek government is about to announce Parliamentary elections for 6 May. All the mainstream political parties are trying to shift the political agenda from austerity measures to racist and xenophobic hysteria and law and order policies, with promises to spend money on building concentration camps for all “illegal immigrants”. Then an individual’s symbolic suicide spectacularly ruined their plans. The political suicide of retired pharmacist Dimitris Xristoulas on 4 April sent a clear political message to the politicians that their “memorandum policies” are leading the majority of the Greek...

International news in brief

Islamist parties have taken to the streets to oppose the ratification of a law which would penalise domestic violence in Pakistan. Women’s rights campaigners confronted the bigots outside parliament last week. The Islamists’ arguments against the legislation include: preventing domestic violence is “Western”; and that the Bill is a copy of Indian legislation. A spokesperson for Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl said, “We will not let these senseless women, who depend on American dollars, to work against the Constitution and Islamic Shariah,” The anti-violence Bill, first introduced in 2009, advocates...

Help the AWL to raise £20,000

Would you like to build support for your dispute or campaign? Why not send a message to trade union and socialist activists by placing a May Day message in Solidarity ? Send a very short text (10-20 words) to us before Friday 28 April, and we will print it in the following week’s May Day issue. It costs £15 for a one-column advert and £30 for two columns. Please also send us an electronic copy of the logo or graphic you would like to use to solidarity@workersliberty.org . Other ways you can help * Taking out a monthly standing order. There is a form at www.workersliberty.org/resources and...

How the Tories fuel the inequality crisis

On 27 April Barclays Bank bosses will face protests from shareholders at their annual general meeting. They will question the bank’s decision to pay a £5.7 million extra to boss Bob Diamond last year in the guise of a “tax equalisation payment”, and the total £17.7 million paid out to him. Another two bosses, Jerry del Missier and Rich Ricci, are being paid £6.7 million and £6.5 million. The labour movement should not leave protest to well-heeled shareholders. We should be raising an outcry against such pay-outs, and demanding that the big banks, already dependent on public subsidies, be put...

Workers’ Power splits

About 15 members of the British Workers Power group, a third of the organisation, have resigned, along with some others in the WP-linked international tendency. The British resigners are mostly workers and students in their 20s — essentially the leadership of the new layer of WP members who expelled the group’s trade unionist old guard in 2006. They have developed similar conclusions to those they helped to expel, now constituted as Permanent Revolution. They have produced a document, A simple proposal for a new anti-capitalist left, in which they propose a regroupment of socialists and...

A Galloway spring?

Many on the left have seized on George Galloway's startling by-election victory in Bradford West (29 March) as proof that the recently-slowing trickle of left-of-Labour electioneering can now become a surge. Socialist Worker (14 April) suggested: “The Galloway effect could now ripple across the country. Imagine if on 3 May Respect won council seats in Bradford while elsewhere radical left candidates such as Michael Lavalette [SWP] and Dave Nellist [Socialist Party] won their seats. This would provide a platform for the left as whole to regroup and create a serious left of Labour alternative”...

Miliband's gaffe

It’s time for another political initiative, so Ed Miliband’s advisers seem to have told him. A follow-up on the NHS to Miliband’s declaration a short while ago that we have “three months to save the Health Service”? No, the sharp-suited wonks have decided that is boring. So, on 15 April, Miliband called for change on... political party funding. It looks as if Miliband, or the wonks, think this is “clever”. Labour gains the high ground by calling for a ban on donations above £5,000 (while defending union political levy contributions), the loss in unions’ above-levy donations is manageable, and...

The campaign that fights for student democracy

Edd Bauer, from the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, is standing for the position of Vice President Welfare in elections at the forthcoming conference of the National Union of Students (24-26 April). Ed Maltby spoke to him about the issues. “This conference will not be facing any new choices. It’s the same fight along the same lines. But this year there is a real, serious challenge from the left, an alternative vision, with candidates who look like they could win it. “There is a groundswell of support for free education and a national demonstration in the first term. The movement has...

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