Solidarity 371, 15 July 2015

The Conservative Minister for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, recently declared that the latest figures on poverty in the UK (the DWP’s Households Below Average Income report for 2013/14) show the government is succeeding in tackling poverty and that inequality is falling. Both claims are based on a wilful misinterpretation of that report. There are several measures of poverty used in the report, the most useful being one of relative poverty (set at 60 per cent of median net household income including benefits). After housing costs, this is currently £232 a week. Using this measure, the...

Last weekend, at the SWP’s much-reduced Marxism event, the SWP discussed the forthcoming EU referendum. Paul McGarr, one of their leaders, put the case for a “socialist no vote”. Having advocated this position in their paper, and — apparently — met significant opposition, the SWP top brass have declared a period of discussion on the question in the run up to their December conference. Ominously, he declared that this debate would take place, “in the best democratic traditions of the SWP.” And in the spirit of that tradition he began a 35 minute speech in favour of a “no vote”; those advocating...

By 1942 it was known in the allied states that the Nazis were systematically slaughtering Jews. The “anti-fascist” powers did nothing about it. This proclamation by the Fourth International was published in the New York Militant in February 1943. Hitler’s mass murders of the Jewish people of Europe arouse in every class conscious worker a feeling of fury against this arch-sadist evil spawn of decaying capitalism. The full brunt of Hitler’s insane violence falls against the Jewish toilers: workers, artisans and small tradesmen who make up the huge majority of the Jews of Europe and the world...

In many ways sexuality and gender identity politics has come of age. Instead of the focus on broad-based political demands for equal rights that were necessary over the past decades, when there was legal discrimination and the majority of the population expressed prejudice, there is now a political imperative to draw sharp dividing lines between the interests of pink capitalists and those of LGBTQ workers. An emboldened Conservative Party in government, together with its big business backers, is determined to attack workers organisations. There is an ideological war going on to delegitimise...

I recently came across Laurent Schwartz’s autobiography, published in French in 1997, and in English in 2001. Maybe for reasons which I’ll indicate, it has not become a well-known book; but there is much to be extracted from it. Schwartz was a Trotskyist from when he was shocked by the Moscow Trials, in 1936, at the age of 21, until 1947; and an energetic left activist all his life, often cooperating with Trotskyists. In 1946-7 he had become active enough to serve on the day-to-day leading committee of the small French Trotskyist movement, and to be invited to work for the movement full-time...

The Tories plan to stop 18-21 year olds claiming Housing Benefit. Sally Hendrick knows what this will mean. It’s hard to know where to start with my story of being a “homeless youth”. Partly because it feels so long ago now that it’s difficult to write as if I was still experiencing it; partly because some of my memories about the chronological order of things are jumbled; partly because I still block a lot of the memories out, it’s difficult to conjure them up to be able to write about them coherently. I am sure there will be many pieces about this cut, from the different perspectives of...

Around the vote on the Memorandum due in the Greek parliament on 15 July we will see great pressure on Syriza MPs and ministers to take a “responsible” stance and endorse the third memorandum. There is talk of a government reshuffle and of demands for the president of the parliament and the Left Platform ministers (who abstained on the 10 July to endorse the continuation of negotiations based on the government’s proposed deal) to resign, even of expulsions of MPs and the formation of a new special purpose coalition government. The working class will not stand by with folded arms. They will use...

George Osborne’s Budget was a cynical attempt to restyle the Tories as the party of the workers. He announced the introduction of a national Living Wage; starting at £7.20, the hourly rate would rise to £9 by 2020. There are three immediate problems here. First the £9 an hour is the same rate that the, now superseded, national minimum wage would have risen to by 2020! Also, the national Living Wage will not, as Osborne, implied compensate for the Budget’s cuts in tax credits. Tax credits may be just an excuse for employers to pay poverty wages, as David Cameron said in justification, but a cut...

PCS members working in the new Universal Credit benefits system will strike for two days from 20-21 July over increasingly oppressive working conditions. Staff voted by 84% to strike about a lack of resources, an oppressive management culture, inadequate training, hard to reach targets and staff shortages. The strike involves over 1, 500 workers at two sites in Bolton and Glasgow, where more than half of all universal credit staff are employed. PCS represents around 80% of staff at the centres that process claims to universal credit and take enquiries from claimants by telephone and online...