Solidarity 307, 11 December 2013

The official consultation period for the Collins report on Labour-union links closes on 24 December. Then Collins, commissioned by Labour leader Ed Miliband, is due to produce proposals to go to a Labour special conference in spring 2014. The whole thing starts from a speech by Ed Miliband in July when said that individual trade unionists in affiliated unions should “opt in” to paying political levies to Labour. Since 1946 the system has been rather than individuals can “opt out”. It was “opt in” only between 1927 and 1946 under a law passed by a Tory government. Labour right-wingers want “opt...

The Observer on 8 December published a leaked Labour Party memo showing that Alan Milburn is to have a role in Labour’s planning for the general election in 2015. Just how big a role is really not clear. The memo outlines no fewer than 22 committees to run election strategy! But Labour’s elected National Executive figures nowhere in the maze of committees. Nor do trade unionists. Milburn does figure. Milburn was a Blairite Labour minister from 1998 to 2005, responsible for introducing Foundation Trusts and PFI in the Health Service. Since he has been serving the Tory-led government as its so...

Trade union and LGBT liberation activists came together on Sunday 8 December to launch the Rainbow International LGBT Activist Solidarity Fund. It is a new initiative which will provide critical financial assistance to frontline LGBT rights activists — principally in the countries where being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender is still illegal — so as to empower individuals and groups to campaign for LGBT rights, sexual liberation, equality, justice, democratic change, and working-class unity. A fundraising target of £10,000 in the first six months was announced at the launch. Applications...

This is slightly different from the version published in the printed paper. At least twice in early December, anarchist students at Sussex University have carried out physical attacks on Socialist Workers Party stalls. Sussex Autonomous Students ( sussexasn.tumblr.com ) report: "A few days ago the SWP turned up to one of the Sussex 5 Solidarity demos. They brought a mass of placards and papers, which they proceeded to distribute from the obligatory stall. We binned their placards, turned over their stall and burnt their papers." AWL supporters at Sussex report that a second, similar incident...

The worst of the cuts in local government are yet to come. Cuts in England in Wales amounted to £5.2 billion in the last two years, and are estimated to be £6.3 billion in the next two. Leaders of Birmingham city council say they need to find £840 million over the next eight years. They have announced 1,000 job cuts and are warning they may not be able to fund all statutory services. Many other smaller councils are looking at the same kind of future. With 500,000 jobs already gone, many further job cuts will be by compulsory redundancy. These have to be fought in the first place by industrial...

Britain faces a housing crisis, possibly the gravest housing shortage since 1945. Simultaneously we have colossal housebuilding programmes which dramatically worsen the crisis. Travel through Hackney, east London, for example and you see massive housing projects being constructed. But it is all luxury housing. Rents start at £500 a week, rising to £1,500. Some houses cost up to £1,500,000. One Tory-controlled local authority is building whole new estates, but only for those on incomes of £90,000 a year or over. Luxury developments are bought up before completion, often by Russian oligarchs...

The Socialist Workers' Party national conference being held in mid-December will result in yet another split. This is the only rational conclusion to draw from a reading of the SWP pre-conference Internal Bulletins. According to a Statement for Our Revolutionary Party, signed by nearly a hundred members: “Comrades who continue to belong to a permanent faction (i.e. the oppositional Rebuilding the Party (RtP) faction, formed in September) should be expelled to ensure that they do not damage and undermine our Party.” (IB1, p.20) A contribution from members of the Merseyside branch expresses the...

After Nelson Mandela died on 5 December, Tory prime minister David Cameron was full of praise for Mandela. Full of hypocrisy, too. In 1989, when Mandela was still in jail under the apartheid regime, Cameron went on an all-expenses-paid trip to South Africa, organised and funded by Strategy Network Internation (SNI), a group created in 1985 specifically to lobby against the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid government. Asked about the trip by the authors of a book on Cameron about the trip, Alistair Cooke, who was Cameron's boss when he worked in 1989 at Tory Central Office, was "simply...

Nelson Mandela was a big man and his long life was punctuated by huge personal and political achievements. Foremost among his personal achievements was the dignity and apparent lack of bitterness with which he emerged from 27 years of imprisonment by the apartheid regime in South Africa. He had the personal grace to embody the long struggle against racism and for democracy when he re-entered the public sphere in 1990 and by nearly all accounts he set an example of leadership during his own long years in gaol. During this period Mandela was himself rather forgotten for much of the time, out of...