Workers' Liberty

On Sunday 10 May around twenty anti-fascists from the Nottingham Stop the BNP campaign distributed 3,500 leaflets in Bulwell, north of the city centre. This area, which in the 1980s elected a Communist Party councillor, has been targeted by the fascist British National Party (BNP) for several months.

So long as the Jewish and Arab workers in the Middle East remain subordinate to the forces of Israeli and Arab (or Islamic) chauvinism — as they are now — the only hope for Palestinian progress towards their own state is from intervention on their behalf from outside governments.

Of those, the USA is the decisive one.

The mass outrage against the politicians that has come with the publication of the details of their petty greed in claiming expenses is fully justified.

Such reports as that:

• A Tory MP charged it to his expenses when he got the moat around his big house cleaned;

• Another Tory grandee drew expenses for having a crystal chandelier installed;

If there had been a national debate on the fate of sheltered housing for the elderly, the cuts that are happening around the country could never have gone ahead!

Why? Because the vast majority of people want to retain sheltered housing and are appalled to learn that it is disappearing.

The Swat situation is complicated. Both sides, the religious fanatics and the government are trying different tactics and are not sure which one will work. The prices for their blunders is paid by ordinary people of the area.

The Taliban settled in Swat long ago and were integrated in the area.

A survey of 129 council leaders by the Local Government Association shows that half the councils in England have axed jobs in the last few months and seven in ten anticipate further redundancies.

In the south-west, 67% of councils have already made cuts in staff; in the the south-east, 57%; and so on down to Yorkshire and Humberside (37%).

Review of Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge (New York Review of Books, 2008)

Richard Greeman’s translation of Serge’s final novel is yet another blow struck against Stalinist despotism and for the recovery of an authentic socialist tradition from the ‘midnight in the century’ of totalitarianism.

More than 800,000 people have now fled fighting in the Swat district of Pakistan. They join a total of around 1.3 million refugees who have fled recent fighting in other parts of the North-West Frontier Province, fleeing, on the one hand threats of violence from the Taliban against people who do not join their “jihad”, and on the other the gunship helicopters of Pakistan’s army.

Lecturers at two thirds of higher education institutions face the real threat of losing their jobs. The Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) has said that 100 institutions are planning collective redundancies.

The victory of at least one BNP MEP in the upcoming Euro-elections now looks almost inevitable. To accept this is not to collapse into nihilism or to admit defeat, but to indict the New Labour, Tory and Lib Dem councillors and MPs across the country.

Their policies of cuts and privatisation have created the conditions in which the BNP — posing as a populist alternative to the establishment — have been allowed to grow.

Thursday 7 April saw the beginning of a fight back by workers and students in Higher Education. UCU members at London Metropolitan University staged a walkout, and the Universities UK conference on privatisation of higher education was disrupted by free education activists.

In the France of 1934, similarly gripped by a world financial crisis, a scandal with some similarities to today’s — the exposure of the links of several Radical deputies to the embezzler Alexandre Stavisky — led to the resignation of the then Prime Minister Camille Chautemps on 30 January.

The AWL’s annual event will this year focus on the capitalist crisis, and on socialist and working-class responses to it.

According to US Labor Against the War, the revival of Iraq’s labour movement first marked by the protests on government workers’ pay in August 2008 is continuing.

Members of Unison employed by Wirral council have been threatened with immediate suspension if they express their opposition to council cuts and job losses publicly.

Rosalind Robson reviews Radio 4’s dramatisation of J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (Sundays 3pm)

I very much enjoy historical novels but JG Farrell’s Booker Prize winning book (part of a trilogy about the British Empire) had until now, escaped my notice.

The RMT is re-balloting nearly 10,000 of its members across London Underground and Transport for London for strike action around disputes centred on jobs, pay and breaches of disciplinary and attendance agreements. This ballot (which starts on 14 May) follows an earlier positive vote for strike action in a ballot which was subsequently ruled invalid by a court order from a legal action brought by Underground bosses. Management ‘s lawyers picked up on trivial errors in the balloting process.

Visteon workers who occupied or picketed their plants when they were sacked without notice on 31 March have won an important victory.

Many of the workers at the three plants in Basildon, Belfast and Enfield had been on Ford mirror contracts, since the company was spun off from Ford in 2000, but when Visteon UK went into receivership the company claimed it did not need to honour the contracts, even though the international company is still solvent.

Fighting migration controls is grinding, a daily and often terrible battle, mostly fought by individuals and small groups of people. Often it is inspiring. But there is a lot going on.

On Thursday 7 May Ayodeji Omotade was acquitted by Brent Magistrates Court of threatening and abusive behaviour.

On 7 May, ENS and other free education activists shut down a conference organised by Universities UK, the government’s Higher Education Funding Council and the “Association for University Research and Industry Links” — a conference held to discuss how to best hand over our higher education system to profit-making businesses.

UNITE: You might think the leaders of a union whose members occupied the Visteon factories and took wildcat strike action in engineering construction would be pre-occupied with struggle.

By Matt Cooper (writing May 2009)

At the start of May, new figures showed that the gap between rich and poor is now bigger than it was when Thatcher left office in 1990. Inequality lessened under Major, to 1997, but has increased every year since Labour were elected except for a small fall between 2000 and 2003.

It is an emergency! For the 2010 general election we should recreate something like the Socialist Alliance of 2001 — a coordination of the activist left able to offer voters a third alternative, a working-class socialist stance opposed to the mainstream parties and to the racist populism of the BNP.

The civil war that has raged, on and off, for over 25 years in Sri Lanka seems to be approaching a horrible endgame, with the remaining fighters of the Tamil minority cornered into a small area by the Sri Lankan army.

The world economic crisis, which already is devastating economies, causing mass unemployment, widespread bankruptcy and business failures, and crises of government finance, is in its early stages yet. How deep, how prolonged, how destructive it will be, nobody now knows.

From the Financial Times: "Shareholders are taken for a far bigger ride by their C-suites [top bosses] than UK taxpayers are by their MPs.... Opponents of John Thain leaked to the media that the one-time chief executive of Merrill Lynch had treated himself to a $1.2m office makeover, with $87,000 rugs, $25,000 pedestal table and $68,000 credenza. But for every case that makes headlines, thousands do not. Which accounts department queries the spa treatment in the boss’s hotel bill or questions helicopter trips to far-off golf courses? C-suites around the world are, with few exceptions, hypocritical in the extreme, demanding austerity from workforces while living high on the hog themselves..."

Continuing a series on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and lies about the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

Rob Williams, the Unite convenor at the Linamar car parts plant in Swansea, who was sacked on 28 April, spoke to Sacha Ismail.

1 May, May Day, is an important date in the history of the workers’ movement. This is the collective account (written by Bob Sutton) of how some London AWL activists spent their May Day.