Workers' Liberty

As postal workers await the results of their national ballot for strike action, due back on 8 October, regional strikes around the country have remained, in the words of one London postal worker, “very solid.”

Gordon Brown used the opportunity of Labour Party conference to pick on a group of people who are poor, powerless and not much older than children.

GMB official Richard Ashcough spoke to Solidarity about the GMB’s amendment to the FBU motion, which aimed to target the focus of the boycott onto goods produced in the Occupied Territories.

John McGhee, FBU National Officer, spoke to Martin Thomas about the FBU’s “boycott Israel” motion to TUC Congress.

On 2 October, an internet report claimed that the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star) had split. CPB general secretary Rob Griffiths and Morning Star editor John Haylett were reported to have quit and started forming a new organisation.

On 4 October, I attended the 70-strong Lille and district conference of the New Anticapitalist Party, the revolutionary socialist party founded in February by activists of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and many other independent socialists.

According to the official history of MI5, Britain’s spy-hunters considered Jack Jones, the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union in the 1970s who died recently, to be a paid agent of the USSR.

In mid-1984, during the year-long miners’ strike, the Sunday Mirror printed an account of an interview with Solidarnosc leader Lech Walesa in which Walesa appeared to side with Margaret Thatcher against the miners. Socialist Organiser (forerunner of Solidarity) commented. A translation of this article appeared in the underground Trotskyist press in Poland in 1984.

A few years ago, some of us were leafletting for No Sweat outside the Doc Martens’ shop in the Triangle shopping centre in Manchester, which is pictured on the front of Anna Minton’s book.

After a few minutes, security guards emerged, pointed to metal studs in the pavement and told us we couldn’t stand inside that line as it was private property

This series got off to a good start as an attempt by the bourgeois establishment to de-sanctify the legacy of Mohandas Gandhi, and strips away some of the mythology surrounding him. The man revealed is an incredibly driven politician, who sacrificed his family, his sexuality, and other earthly pleasures, in pursuit of building a mass movement.

In the final book of his Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson turned to the nefarious activities of Sweden’s secret state for inspiration. It is the only area of public corruption this one-time editor of the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjärde internationalen, and expert on the European far-right, had not yet exposed.

Bursting onto television screens and newspapers in the wake of a racist provocation-turned-riot in Luton in May this year, the embryonic forces of what now constitute the English Defence League have maintained a steady presence in the media and on the streets. But who are the EDL?

Birmingham city children’s social services have been found “unfit for purpose” as child deaths in that city hit the headlines.

Leeds City Council Street Scene workers have been on all-out indefinite strike since 7 September.

On 21 November University College London Students for Free Education will host a National Convention Against Tuition Fees for anyone who thinks higher education should be free for all.

As regular Solidarity readers will know, Workers’ Liberty will be standing our comrade Jill Mountford as a candidate in the next general election, in the south east London constituency of Camberwell

Migrants in Calais are on hunger strike in an attempt to win asylum in France.

The Conservative conference has confirmed what we can expect from a Tory government: deep cuts, attacks on the working class, and radical right-wing politics.

The Policing and Crime Bill which is set to come into effect this November, will, among other things, outlaw “paying for [the] sexual services of a prostitute subjected to force”.

I am standing in the general election in the south-east London constituency of Camberwell and Peckham, against New Labour deputy leader and loyal New Labour hack Harriet Harman.

Engineering construction workers have voted to reject a new two-year pay-and-conditions deal despite a recommendation to accept both from union officials and from their national shop stewards' committee.

The Vestas wind turbine blade workers on the Isle of Wight have called a meeting for Friday 9 October to discuss the future of their campaign for Friday 9 October.

On 6 October Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, announced that he was writing to the public sector salary review bodies calling on them to “freeze the pay of 40,000 senior public servants in 2010-11. And he recommended that about 700,000 middle-ranking public servants, including doctors, dentists and prison officers, get a rise of between 0 per cent and 1 per cent”.

For workers' unity across Europe

On 23 September thousands of GM workers from Germany joined Belgian carworkers to demonstrate in Antwerp against threatened job losses.

A long-time Labour Party activist reports on some of the things at Labour Party conference which didn't reach the newspapers or the TV coverage.