Workers' Liberty

This week, a police report showed that immigrants are, in fact, not the bunch of criminals that some right-wing rags and ignorant bigots would have you believe. It seems that even in the few crimes where a disproportionate number of perpetrators are foreign, the same disproportion of victims are also foreign.

At the time of going to press, 1,200 members of Amicus/Unite employed at Grangemouth oil refinery are due to begin 48 hours of strike action at 6.00am on Sunday 27 April – the first strike in a British oil refinery since 1935.

On Sunday 20 Apr, the Bangladeshi Caterer’s Association (BCA) mobilised thousands for a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, calling for an end to raids on restaurants by the Border and Immigration Agency (BIA) and the regularisation of undocumented staff. The demonstration originated with restaurant workers and owners in China Town and spread to involving bosses and workers from other restaurants.

On 27 March, Augustine, a Biafran independence activist was deported to Nigeria, where his brother has been killed and his wife and children are missing. He is still laid up with the injuries he sustained by the five thugs who twisted his neck and kicked and punched him to the ground while handcuffed. Unable to afford medical care, we fear for his life.

The Probation Service is proposing to remove the automatic annual increments awarded to most workers. It is the first public-service sector to come out with this proposal.

Members of the public service union Unison should have already received ballot papers for the Service Group Executive (SGE) elections being held now.

Following the health conference of the public services union Unison in mid April, members can be expecting to receive ballot papers early in May inviting them to accept or reject the Government’s proposed three year pay deal.

In sharp contrast to the health sector, members of the public sector union Unison in local government are being given a clear direction to reject their current pay offer and prepare for strike action.

On 12 April — a very wet Saturday morning — forty feminists from around the country gathered at the London School of Economics for a teach-in on the threats to reproductive rights in the UK and internationally. The event was organised by Feminist Fightback, with a balance of in-depth discussion and practical planning for action.

Workers in the housing charity Shelter are on strike again on 24-25 April against enforced cuts in pay and conditions. Previous strikes on 5 and 10 March forced Shelter bosses, who at first insisted that they would never negotiate, to put the cuts on hold and talk at ACAS. But their ACAS offer was only a one-off “compensation” payment.

Civil service by Workers’ Liberty PCS Members

A number of Groups (sectors) in PCS are striking on 24 April alongside the teachers and lecturers.

Our strike will make the news and will undoubtedly worry the powers that be; how much better if the whole of the PCS union was on strike.

Last week thousands of garment workers in Bangladesh went on strike in protest at rising food prices. Factory workers earn as little as a $1 a day and have seen the price of rice increase by a third since last year. Some 30 million people in Bangladesh – nearly a quarter of the population — may be going without a daily meal.

For the third time in 15 years Silvio Berlusconi has won a convincing victory in the Italian elections of 13-14 April. His rightwing People of Liberty party, along with his ally Umberto Bossi’s populist and racist Lega Nord (supported in wide areas of the north), has been guaranteed comfortable majorities in both houses of the Italian parliament.

Workers at Mahalla in the Nile Delta have suffered a fresh wave of repression from Hosni Mubarak’s regime after a series of militant strikes, protests and demonstrations beginning on April 6th. The Egyptian police arrested hundreds of workers, demonstrators and even journalists reporting on the revolt, as the regime seeks to silence working class people angry at low wages and massive food price inflation which has seen bread prices go up nearly 50% in the last year.

Numa Andrés Paredes Betancourt, a member of the National Executive Committee of the ACEU (one of Colombia’s main student union federations), visited Britain recently as part of a trip organised by

On 15 April, Behrooz Karimizadeh, one of the founding activists in the Iranian socialist group Freedom and Equality-Seeking Students, paid 300,000 toman (roughly £16,000) to be released.

Mike Sambo of the Zimbabwe International Socialist Organisation spoke to Sacha Ismail

What is the latest with the election results?

Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party and Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission have withheld the results of the first round presidential elections and instigated a recount in 23 electoral areas.

May Day, the International Workers’ Day, is known as a commemoration of the Haymarket riots in Chicago on 4 May 1886. But the reason why May Day was first celebrated internationally — the struggle for the eight-hour working day — is often forgotten.

The new film Three and Out is a comedy about a London Underground driver who suffers two “one unders” — people throwing themselves under his train — and then deliberately goes for a third in order to get a pay off. Here a Workers’ Liberty member who drives trains on the mainline and was previously a Tube driver, and experienced a “one under” himself, responds.

Review of two new books The Saladin Murders and the Bethlehem Murders by Matt Rees.

Continuing a series on the history of the blues

Whilst the participation of Rifondazione Comunista and other parties of the “radical left” in the Prodi government of 2006-08 was clearly a serious mistake and has been belatedly acknowledged as such by Bertinotti himself (see il Manifesto, 6 April 2008), Hugh Edwards is wrong to concentrate his fire on Bertinotti and the PRC

Solidarity’s current debate about the future of the nuclear industry appears to be an argument at cross purposes. Martin Thomas, Les Hearn and others have argued that nuclear is not as dangerous or as lethal as some other energy sources like coal. If only we had a planned economy under workers’ control without a £70 billion Trident replacement project in the pipeline, then nuclear would be a good idea.

In August 1994 the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire in its “Long War”, which by then had lasted 24 years (interspersed with some previous, temporary ceasefires). The 1994 ceasefire was interrupted by a partial return to bombing between February 1996 and July 1997, but eventually the ceasefire proved permanent. The Provisionals entered negotiations.

The London Democratic Association advocated the overthrow of the English ruling classes by means of revolution. They rejected outright any limiting of the Chartist movement to pacifist — or “moral force” — principles.

On 23 April, the Guardian published a letter from the three Tower Hamlets Respect councillors linked to the SWP, Oliur Rahman, Rania Khan and Lufta Begum, which denounces the “extremist” views of Islamist organisations like al-Muhajiroun, calls on the government to “stop” them and requests a meeting with Tower Hamlets police to discuss the issue.

Christian Picquet, former editor of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire paper Rouge, will no longer be able to hold on to his full-time post in the LCR office after the poor level of support won by his tendency at their recent conference.

In a magnificent display of working-class solidarity, dockworkers in Durban, South Africa, refused to unload 77 tonnes of Chinese weapons bound for Zimbabwe.