Workers' Liberty

In Britain, rising food prices — up over 15% a year — mean poorer households scrape and struggle. In many countries, they mean people starve. The most basic foods — wheat, rice, corn — have pretty much doubled. Families don’t have enough to eat. In Egypt, workers have struck and occupied factories. In other countries, there have been food riots.

Since the end of February when the government introduced new penalties for bosses who hire “illegal workers” the number of raids on workplaces has increased drastically — twice as many in the last few months as during the whole of the 1990s. Fines totaling £500,000 have been issued. 63,140 people, asylum seekers and undocumented workers, were removed from the UK last year. That is still not enough for the Liberal Democrats and the Tories who continue to urge on the rabid dogs who run the Immigration Department.

Since 15 April, a series of unprecedented strikes by undocumented workers have taken place in France. In the greater Parisian region alone, an estimated one thousand undocumented workers are involved in strike action. The strike and actions, led by the CGT and other unions, is mainly concentrated in construction and restaurants. All the disputes are demanding the mass regularisation of undocumented workers.

Five members of Sheffield University student union’s delegation to the 2008 National Union of Student’s conference (including myself) face disciplinary action following their refusal to vote in line with a “mandate” imposed on them by their union’s Council in favour of the NUS Governance Review.

May 2008. Sixty years after the declaration of the state of Israel in compliance with the November 1947 resolution of the UN. The conflict with the Palestinians and the Arabs which at the Jewish state’s birth led to Arab invasion, war and the elimination of the Palestinian state stipulated in the UN resolution (almost all its territory went to Jordan and Egypt) is, perhaps, further from being resolved now than it was sixty years ago. The 41 year occupation of territory captured in the June 1967 war continues to poison Isreali-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab relations.

A fortnight after the Grangemouth oil refinery was shut down by strike action, talks continue between refinery owners (INEOS) and UNITE.

The strike by the 1,200 union members was in defence of the refinery’s final salary pension scheme, inherited by INEOS from the refinery’s previous owners (BP).

Pay will be the major issue before this year’s PCS national conference. Given the general pay squeeze across the public sector and high inflation rate everybody expects that civil servants will get below inflation offers;

Two out of three Unison members voted to reject the local government pay deal in a consultative ballot. The yes vote was helped by the action taken on 24 April. These strikes gave a public profile and some urgency to the issue.

A pay offer covering the next three years is being put to health workers this month. The national leadership of UNISON is completely split on whether it should be accepted or rejected. Workers’ Liberty supporters are convinced we should reject the offer. We also believe that industrial action is possible and we can win.

The National Union of Teachers Executive met on 8 May for the first time since the 24 April pay strike. For a while it looked like there would be no discussion or vote on proposals to develop the pay campaign.

We are probably on the way to a Tory government. In the local elections on 1 May, not only did Labour do badly; the Tories did well. An opinion poll on the weekend of 7-8 May showed the Tories ahead of Labour by 49% to 23%.

In a television interview on Sunday 4 May Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander suggested she was in favour of an early referendum on Scottish independence — “Bring it on!” was the expression she used. Later Alexander said she wanted a referendum during the next twelve months and that Gordon Brown backed her position.

The “official” rate of inflation currently stands at 3% (for April 2008).

At the start of May, US troops blockaded Sadr City, the huge mainly-Shia district of Baghdad where two and a half million people live and is the stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

I attended the first ever Social Forum in Kiev, Ukraine. Called by a coalition of Ukrainian independent trade unions and left wing groups for 1 and 2 May 2008 it included speakers from trade unions, and the anti-fascist movement, and special guest Dashty Jamal, an Iraqi trade unionist and refugee rights campaigner.

In France, students and teachers are continuing a huge strike against the Sarkozy government’s planned attacks on education which threaten to demolish state education, and open the way for a Blair-style “choice agenda” and private-sector expansion into education.

From a statement by the International Socialist Organisation Zimbabwe

Comrades from all sides of the AWL’s debate on Iran/Iraq summarise what they they thought of the debate, what they think were the important arguments in the discussion and where they think the discussion can now go.

Over the weekend of 10– 11 May the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty held its annual conference. The event was lively and vibrant, with a lot of newer and younger comrades contributing to the debates and discussions. We used the time to assess our previous year’s work and plan our future work.

I am from the Labour Party Pakistan, although I am embarrassed to say “Labour Party” when I come to Britain! But it meets the objective reality in Pakistan, where there has been no such class-based party before.

Sheffield was to be the second city in England to host a Hooters franchise — the American restaurant chain where young “cheer leader/surfer girl-next-door” waitresses, wearing a uniform of “wh

The split between the SWP and Galloway-sycophants in Respect has politically destabilised and reduced both sides. Destabilised in the sense that the SWP was presented with the problem of sticking to its perspective of building a populist alternative to New Labour whilst the Galloway faction lost its best organisers and activists.

Persepolis is a story of the bravery of a young Iranian girl as she learns and comes to understand the politics of her nation, and the various factions that have fought to rule over it through history.

Peter Doggett’s book recalls in detail (over 525 pages) the uneasy relationship between rock stars, political activists and the “counter–culture” between 1965 and 1972.

Tony Stark is a millionaire weapons designer who decides to ensure his weapons never fall into the wrong hands — but only after being captured by terrorists in Afghanistan using them!

Like many teenagers in 1968, my political education was as an observer for many years of a number of major struggles throughout the world. The civil rights movement in the US; the events in China, which were mystifying as portrayed by the media and explained meaningfully by no-one, and the horrors of the US war in Vietnam.

The British National Party has made a small but significant advance in May’s local and London Assembly elections. The BNP now have:

• A member on the 25 person Greater London Assembly;

This is an odd sort of crisis for a Marxist. If you had read Marxist crisis theory at a fairly abstract level, I think you would be a bit puzzled by this crisis.

The General Convention of the Industrious Classes opened in London on 4 February 1839, riding high on a wave of popular unrest and unparalleled mass mobilisations. London Democrat William Cardo wrote that the “Parliament of the House of Lords and Commons would soon be assembled… and at the same time another Parliament, the People’s Parliament would assemble… there would be the spirit of the English people”.

On Tuesday 20 May MPs will debate and vote on anti-choice amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. The Bill includes such things as provision for research on different types of embryos. It is being used to attack abortion rights, to cut the current 24 week time limit to 20 or even 13 weeks! The fight against these attacks needs to be seen as central to women’s liberation and class struggle.