Solidarity 325, 21 May 2014

More students using food banks

The National Union of Students (NUS) has expressed its concern at the rise of students using food banks. At the University of Hull, the number of students having to use the unistudent on’s food parcel service has doubled in the past 12 months to 200. Around half a dozen student unions have similar services. Other institutions, including Walsall College in the West Midlands, are having to look into initiatives designed to help their students cope with finding food. The increase in students using these services has been blamed on the rising cost of living, as well as the Student Loans Company...

Free school meals not a gimmick

Nick Clegg’s policy for free school meals for all children under seven in England has been at the centre of a row between the Tories and the Lib Dems. The plan was denounced in the media by Michael Gove’s former advisor Dominic Cummings as “dumb” and “a gimmick”, the figures for which were drawn up on “the back of a fag packet”. It is still unclear whether Cummings was acting solo or was a stalking horse for Gove and the Tories. At Clegg’s urging, Gove and Lib Dem schools minister David Laws penned a joint article in the Times insisting the policy had “cross-party support.” Free school meals...

Save Newcastle's Children's Centres

Sure Start Children’s Centre services in Newcastle are facing a two thirds cut in funding over the next three years. The proposals will mean closure of services, buildings, parents groups, activities for young children. It will mean at least 100 jobs will be lost across the council and the voluntary sector, opportunities for children and parents will continue to be worsened after significant cuts already since 2010. Many families will be even more isolated following the axing of the council’s play and youth services last year. The council proposals for 2013 – 2016 amount to over £5 million...

G4S to run child protection services?

Michael Gove has surpassed himself in proving himself to be a callous disregarder of the needs of children. If we thought his attacks on the democratic accountability of community schools were not enough, his department has now proposed the privatisation of Child Protection services, including the power to remove children from their families. If these plans were to go ahead, the most vulnerable people in society would be reliant on services which are subject to the vagaries of the market. Professor Ray Jones of Kingston University states that G4S and Serco have been trying to get into these...

Get ready to fight the frackers!

A recent report from the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee has urged the government to go “all out for shale”, encouraging the exploitation of UK gas reserves through the technique of fracking. The dash for extreme energy is implicitly linked to the dash for short-term profits. Previously, extracting fossil fuels like shale gas from the ground has been too costly, but with peak oil gone, it capitalises on a market that feels the pressure of energy scarcity. The report justifies this venture by favourably comparing the environmental cost of gas to coal, but makes no mention of the...

Jersey under the Nazis

In the British Channel Islands on 9 May this year, islanders celebrated the 69th anniversary of their liberation from Nazi occupation at the end of the Second World War. The occupation of the Channel Islands should be intriguing to anyone interested in working class politics for two reasons. The first is that the islands were the only part of Britain occupied by the Germans during the war. The second, and perhaps more interesting, is that they were the only occupied territory in Europe that had the same government before, during and after the occupation. On Jersey, the largest of the Channel...

The great housing disaster

Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford and the author of many works on issues of social inequality. His latest work is All that is Solid: the Great Housing Disaster. Cathy Nugent spoke to him a few days before the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, warned bankers and the government to bring rising house prices in London and the south-east under control, or risk another crash. For Dorling, the structural causes behind rising house prices are bound up with the unequal distribution of housing. Those inequalities are stark — in the UK...

What the left thinks of Modi

On May 16, Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi stormed the Indian elections on a scale not seen since 1984. He beat the National Congress Party, who have dominated India politically since 1947, by 316 seats to only 50. Solidarity has gathered opinions on Modi from the left in India. Praful Bidwai: “The Left parties are floundering. They are unsure of their prospects in their former bastions West Bengal and Kerala, and are experimenting with little-known candidates and independents. They have no strategy for crafting a non-Congress-non-BJP front. Left unity, long their major asset, is under threat...

When Protestant workers smashed power-sharing

The second weekend of the Ulster Protestant general strike against power-sharing further exposed the dark underside of the strike. On Friday 24 May, four people were killed; two were Catholics bar owners murdered for opening their businesses in defiance of the strike and two motorists died when they crashed into a tree felled as part of a barricade. That night a gang in Ballymena also wrecked pubs and a cafe, and minibuses of thugs in Ballymoney ordered customers out of pubs. Saturday 25 May proved to be a turning point, but not in the way hoped by the Northern Irish power-sharing Executive...

Social media is here to stay

The replies to my article in Solidarity from Jodi Dean (318), Martin Thomas (319) and James Doran (320) centre around questions of the impact of the internet, and particularly Facebook, on political organisation and activism. I agree with Jodi and Martin that the internet does not replace older forms of organising, both in terms of on-the-ground union and political organising, and in terms of organisational forms such as the union and party. Network forms of organisation that emerge from social media lack long-term commitment and organisational structure, structured democracy and...

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