Solidarity 339, 8 October 2014

Tories pledge to scrap Human Rights Act

"We do not require instruction on this from judges in Strasbourg" claimed Cameron in his speech at Tory Party conference, as he promised to scrap the 1998 Human Rights Act and reform Britain's relationship with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Grayling, the Justice Secretary, has set out proposals that would see the Human Rights Act which enshrines the ECHR into UK law replaced with a "British bill of rights" but it is as yet unclear which rights the Tories feel we should and should not have. Grayling says "we can no longer tolerate this mission creep" referring to the idea that the...

Care UK and Ritzy Cinemas: staying strong against low pay

On Friday 10 October Care UK workers will be striking for the 81st day in their campaign for a Living Wage. Stewards David Honeybone and Diane Marsden spoke to Solidarity . What led to you taking industrial action? It started in 2012 when Doncaster Council put our service [supported living for adults with learning disabilities] out to tender. Care UK won the bid and took over in September 2013. Under the NHS we were paid a basic rate and an enhancement for anti-social hours and sleeping over. Care UK tried to cut this and vastly reduce sick pay, maternity leave and annual leave. We rejected...

Save the People's History Museum

When I was a young boy, my grandfather told me a story of a bus depot, a mass picket line, and a scab bus being turned on its side by an angry crowd. Later I realised he was telling me about his highlight of the 1926 General Strike. A union railwayman all his working life, he never made it into the history books, nor did his wife’s twin children who, born a year after the strike, died because no doctor could be afforded. My family’s history is nothing out of the ordinary for working class lives — the sort of lives you can see reflected in the halls and archives of the Manchester People’s...

Between art and activism

As the Labour and Conservative parties staged their annual conferences, an exhibition entitled Politika: Art & the Affairs of the City was staged in a former cotton mill in Ancoats, Manchester. Curated by the “insurgent art activist” collective Upper Space, 20 artists put on a programme of workshops, speakers and activities “to generate starting points for an answer, another view, in order to to sustain another ideology against consumerism and the disempowerment that it represents”. Perhaps the best element was Politika’s attempt at engagement with the residents of Ancoats, who have been...

A political alternative to “the one per cent”?

The idea of “the one per cent”, the richest one per cent who take a grossly unfair share of the income and wealth in advanced capitalist society, was first popularised by the 2001 Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy Wall Street declared, “We are the 99 per cent”. Danny Dorling seeks to build on this anger to stoke a mood for redressing that imbalance. Dorling is well aware that the one per cent is an arbitrary figure, but believes is a better way of talking about wealth inequality than statistical constructs such as the Gini co-efficient (which represents the income distribution of a...

What is Ebola virus, where does it come from?

From a scary but rare problem, Ebola Virus has exploded into public consciousness as a real disaster in West Africa and a potential threat to anywhere else connected by any means of travel. The problem has been exacerbated by the lack of local health care infrastructure, distrust of aid agencies and lack of help from the richest countries. Where has the virus come from and why is it now such a problem? Back in 1976, a new virus was discovered in a group of villages in the equatorial forests of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo). Victims suffered fever, pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, and...

Why we should oppose British exit from the EU

“...The slogan of the United States of Europe will in all cases retain a colossal meaning as the political formula of the struggle of the European proletariat for power. In this program is expressed the fact that the national state has outlived itself — as a framework for the development of the productive forces, as a basis for the class struggle, and thereby also as a state form of proletarian dictatorship.” Trotsky wrote about the United States of Europe in 1915, refining his ideas in 1917, after the February Russian Revolution, in the midst of the First World War. Almost a century later, a...

Talking, explaining, and telling the truth

I knew Tom Cashman as a friend and comrade from the early 70s. Tom was someone who had a hinterland; his interests spanned good whiskey, particle physics, a love of Sean O’Casey’s plays, modernist architecture, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of schisms in the Catholic Church, which quite frankly bemused me. Tom was a very rounded person and a very humorous one. But I want to say something about Tom the public man. Tom was a Marxist, an atheist and trade unionist who dedicated his life to the working class and had an unwavering conviction that socialism was the only hope of humanity. Tom’s main...

No Lib Dem-Labour coalition

In the first of the Mr Bean movies, the protagonist accidentally sneezes on a priceless painting that will soon be the centre piece of a grand exhibition. Keen to keep the painting clean, he takes a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe away the snot. Unfortunately, a pen has leaked in his pocket, and the handkerchief inadvertently smears blue ink on the portrait. Ten agonising minutes follow in which each of Mr Bean’s efforts to hide the damage makes the situation immeasurably worse, and by the time he abandons the effort, the face of the portrait has been bleached white and scrawled over with...

The rich up 15%, the rest down

Real wages in the public sector went down 15% between 2008 and 2013. Across the economy real wages have fallen by 8.2%. Across the economy the average wage rise last year, concentrated in manufacturing and financial services, was just 2% in money terms. Price inflation was 2% (CPI) or 2.7% (RPI). Over half of the wage rises were below RPI. In a sample survey of wage settlements for six million workers between August 2013 and August 2014, 13% faced a wage freeze and only 8.3% had a wage rise above 3%. In July this year the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that Britain will be the...

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