Workers' Liberty

By Pat Yarker

A sixteen-year old schoolboy pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey this month to raping his teacher in her classroom at a south London school. He was 15 years old at the time of the assault in September 2004.

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By Colin Foster

Three and a half months after the 30 January elections, Iraq now has an elected government, a coalition of the Shia and Kurdish alliances, with some seats set aside for Sunni Arab politicians. The Sunni-Islamist “resistance” has marked the occasion with a new surge of bombings.

Local RMT members and supporters joined a lively demonstration through London on Saturday 30 April, demanding that rail privatisation be reversed.

Marching from Whitehall Place to King’s Cross, demonstrators took their message to thousands of shoppers and tourists. For the previous two weeks, a group of 25 union members had marched through cities from Glasgow to London on a mobile demonstration.

By Vicki Morris

Mayday in Europe, in addition to the traditional marches, witnessed a number of “Euromayday” events. The organisers are more or less anarchistic activists involved in struggles of the unemployed and insecurely employed and are generally scornful of the “organised” labour movement.

Twelve “sans papiers”, migrants with no legal status, who had been on hunger strike for 50 days in France, have learned that they will get full rights.

They had moved to a trade union centre in Paris after they were turfed out of the offices of Unicef.

The European Parliament has voted to scrap an opt-out from the rules limiting the working week in the EU to an average of 48 hours, but the ruling won’t come into force for another three years and it could still be blocked if the UK Government wins support in the Council of Ministers.

By a health worker

UNISON members employed by private contractor Serco at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital have decided to take their claim for NHS pay and conditions to arbitration with ACAS.

By a London Underground worker

A shorter working week deal on London Underground which gave workers a 35 hour week is about to blow apart.
Management have used the deal as cover to viciously attack staffing levels, to push through cuts that they have wanted for a long time. Double-cover supervisors, platform turns, Ticket Office opening hours, gateline coverage — are all in the firing line.

By a CWU member

Hardly had the last election result been counted, and the Chair of Royal Mail, Allan Leighton, began to call for a share issue and employee buyout for the ailing firm. He says he wants to pump £2 billion extra investment into the postal industry. His proposals, as far as they have been made clear, assume a part-privatisation of Royal Mail. The CWU has written to all MPs saying it opposes such proposals.

Truck drivers from across Europe have agreed to work towards more European-wide trade union co-operation to tackle problems on social dumping, security and health as well as organising in pan-European companies. At a conference attended by over eighty delegates from nine EU conference at the T&G Centre in Eastbourne, delegates highlighted action on these points as well as individual country concerns.

Pete Radcliff, an AWL member, stood in Nottingham East under the banner of Socialist Unity. He got 373 votes, or 1.2% of the poll, about a third of his score in 2001. He writes about the lessons of the campaign

By Bruce Robinson

In Manchester Withington, the Liberal Democrats overturned an 11,524 Labour majority with a 20% swing to win the seat by 667 votes.

Early in the campaign, I was called by a Lib Dem phone canvasser. When asked why I wasn’t going to vote for them, I said “It’s because you’re a bunch of cynical opportunists.” (Not the whole reason, but a good enough starting point!) The Lib Dem campaign bore this out.

ARGENTINA

Last month a judged ordered that a public notice of ownership be posted at the ceramics Zanon factory in Argentina.

The notice would have allowed a venture capitalist or the previous owner to buy Zanon Ceramics for pennies.

Trade unionists in Pakistan face a daily struggle to organise. The unions have often been hijacked by reactionary political parties. Farooq Sulehria of the Labour Party Pakistan tells the story.

In Pakistan people often take on two jobs or have some small business after work to survive. All our governments, whether khaki or civilian, have had the same IMF-World Bank dictated neo-liberal agendas: privatisation, downsizing, and an end to subsidies. It may have been different had there been a workers’ party built by trade unions. But

The basic statement of the Make Poverty History campaign, and a response by No Sweat

TRADE INJUSTICE, DEBT AND LACK OF AID

Today, the gap between the world’s rich and poor is wider than ever. Global injustices such as poverty, AIDS, malnutrition, conflict and illiteracy remain rife.

In the election to the Westminster Parliament, the “moderate” Ulster Unionist Party led by David Trimble — who lost his seat plus four others — was almost wiped out by the Paisleyite Democratic Unionist Party.

Read part 1 here.

REFORM THE SIX COUNTIES?

The entity designed for majority-Protestant self-rule was to have a new political mechanism transplanted into it.

• Tescopoly

• Health inequality
• Childhood obesity

TESCOPOLY

The announcement by Tesco boss Terry Leahy that his company made £65 million profit per second last year was greeted with joy by the capitalist community. Declan Curry of the London Stock Exchange was only surprised at how muted the announcement was. “We should not be ashamed of profit,” he said. Tesco says it will “create” 25,000 jobs next year.

While George Bush hypocritically rails against nuclear proliferation in Iran, the US and Europe are colluding in extending nuclear energy in the countries affected by the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. This survey — we have edited it slightly for reasons of space — was published recently on the Schnews website.

Duncan Morrison reviews “Skint”, BBC1, Mondays, 10.35pm

The documentary series Skint has reminded me how valuable good documentaries can be. Using a not quite fly on the wall style, the makers ask questions to their subjects as they go through their lives. They follow a number of people and families in the Birmingham area as they struggle to make ends meet. These are Britain’s poor.

Joan Trevor reviews the documentary “Cinema Iran” (Channel 4) and looks at some of Iran’s cinematic output

On the surface, Iranian cinema is everything US cinema isn’t, so Mark Cousins began his Cinema Iran programme interviewing movie goers in New York.

On the weekend of 14-16 May, some eleven members and friends of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty will be at the political festival organised by the French Marxist group Lutte Ouvrière in the countryside near Paris.

From Eric Lee, Labourstart

We have received a report from Geneva regarding the arrests and detention without trial of three trade union leaders in Eritrea. You may remember Eritrea — it is sometimes in the news because of its ongoing conflict with Ethiopia (from which it won its independence several years ago). But what you may not know is that the country is a single-party state which brutally represses dissent.

by Tony Osborne

Some Councils, like Hackney where I live, are scrabbling to get on the Arms Length Management Organisation (ALMO) ladder.

Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, written in late 1901 and early 1902, is one of the most important books ever written. Certainly it is one of the most important socialist texts in existence.

Houzan Mahmoud from the Worker-communist Party of Iraq talks about her recent visit to Iraq. Houzan is a UK representative for the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Union in Iraq. Interview by Martin Thomas

The SWP and the ‘clerical-fascists’

In Britain the SWP usually claims that it is a “slander” to say that their allies, Muslim Association of Britain, are an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest Islamic fundamentalist party in the Arab world.

European Stalinism began to collapse with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The former USSR satellites on whose people Russian Stalinism had imposed totalitarian dictatorship for nearly 50 years began to free themselves from Russia overlordship. Stalinism in the USSR itself collapsed completely when an inept hard-line Stalinist attempted coup failed, in August 1991.

John Strawson is a law lecturer at the University of East London, and also teaches at Bir Zeit University, in the occupied West Bank. He spoke to Solidarity about the special council (conference) which the Association of University Teachers (AUT) has called for 26 May after protests from its members about the decision of its regular conference, on 22 April, to impose an academic boycott on two Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan.

A grassroots activist, socialist and outspoken critic of the current FBU leadership has been elected General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, defeating incumbent Andy Gilchrist. Matt Wrack beat Gilchrist by 12,833 votes to 7,259, in a poll which saw 40% of the union’s membership voting, a high turn-out for a union election.