Solidarity 310, 22 January 2014

Winter Olympics cast spotlight on bigotry

The staging of the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Black Sea city of Sochi has cast a spotlight on anti-gay bigotry in Russia — in its “legal” and “popular” forms. In June 2013, the Russian Duma (Parliament) unanimously voted through an amendment to Article 5 of the Federal Law on the “Defence of Children from Information Causing Harm to Their Health and Development”. The stated purpose of the amendment is to protect children from “information which propagandises a denial of traditional family values and non-traditional sexual relations.” Non-traditional relations are defined as “relations not...

UKIP bigot blames gay marriage for floods

With the flood of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants that the United Kingdom Indepence Party (Ukip) predicted failing to materialise, bigots have found another scapegoats for the actual floods that hit Britain recently. According to David Silvester, a Ukip councillor in Oxfordshire, the floods were a punishment from God for the government’s support for same-sex marriage. He claims he even wrote to David Cameron to warn him of impending disaster. Ukip initially refused to condemn him, saying: “if the media are expecting Ukip to either condemn or condone someone’s personal religious views they...

New loophole find helps Bedroom Tax fight

Anti-Bedroom Tax campaigner Peter Barker has discovered a major loophole in the legislation. He found that any tenant whose housing benefit claim for a property dates from 1996 or before should not be liable for the Bedroom Tax, even according to the government’s own legislation. His blog post on this was widely read, and lead to the government telling councils and housing associations to pay back the rent claimed for the so-called “spare room”. This should affect about 40,000 tenants (still less then a tenth of those hit by this policy). The government is now moving to try to close the...

Social housing, not social cleansing

29 East London-based young mothers are under threat of eviction after Newham Council cut funding to their accommodation, in East Thames’s “Focus E15” building in Stratford. The mums have been fighting to stay in social housing since last October. They have been making national news and local front pages. Most recently, on Friday 17 January, they confronted their landlords, East Thames, occupying one of the “show flats” that East Thames has been promoting to the wealthy to entice rich people to move to Stratford. The accommodation that the mums and their babies are housed in is already...

HE pay dispute must step up

The University and College Union (UCU), Unison, and Scottish teachers’ union EIS will strike on 6 February in their dispute against Higher Education employers’ 1% pay offer. Unite, the other main union representing non-academic staff in Higher Education, say they are undertaking further consultation before joining the strike. Although the announcement of a further strike day is positive, many workers were hoping for an escalation of the dispute to a two or three-day strike following one-day strikes on 31 October and 3 December. Union members have essentially been kept in the dark since...

Tube unions plan political fight against cuts

Over 100 came to London’s Conway Hall for the launch of the “Hands Off London Transport” campaign (HOLT). HOLT has been initiated by Tube union RMT as part of its fight against huge job losses, ticket office closures, and attacks on workers’ terms and conditions on London Underground. The launch rally also included representatives from TSSA, another Tube union, as well as Disabled People Against the Cuts (DPAC) activists, the National Pensioners’ Convention, the Green Party, and Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn. John McDonnell MP sent his support. RMT members on London Underground will strike for 48...

Unison calls “day of protest”

Unison has called a “day of protest” on local government pay for Tuesday 4 February. The union says: “Branches across the UK will be organising protests, stunts and rallies at lunchtime and outside work hours, working jointly with GMB and Unite.” But the union is very clear that “this is not industrial action”. A “day of protest” is better than nothing, but much more will be needed to win real victories.

Teachers: defy the drift!

Britain’s two main teaching unions have pulled back for a second time from a promise of joint national strikes. Following regional strikes in October 2013, the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) assured members there would be a joint national strike before Christmas 2013. That commitment was reneged on, superficially because Michael Gove offered “talks”. Both unions publicly committed, in writing, to striking nationally no later than 13 February if those talks failed to yield serious concessions. Although there is no sign...

Support the 3 Cosas strike

Outsourced workers at the University of London’s central administration, employed by Cofely GDF-Suez (until recent by Balfour Beatty), will be striking from 27-29 January. Terms and conditions for Cofely GDF-Suez workers, specifically sick pay, holidays, and pensions, are much improved after a previous strike, but still inferior to those terms and conditions of direct employees of the University of London. The demand for parity forms the basis of the “3 Cosas” (“3 Things”) campaign, which has seen workers mobilise against university management for over a year. The first and third days of the...

Torture photos expose Assad

“At least 11,000 human beings have been tortured and executed”, says David Crane, one of three international lawyers who released a report on Syria on 21 January. Those 11,000 were not killed in the heat of battle. They were taken prisoner by the government of dictator Bashar al-Assad, and then tortured and killed in jail. Their families were told they had died of “heart attacks” or “breathing failure”. The evidence comes from a photographer for the Assad regime’s military police who defected. Published just before the “Geneva 2” talks on Syria open in Switzerland, it will spike an incipient...

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