Solidarity 394, 17 February 2016

When the loudmouths at Fox News used to warn about the threat of America being taken over by socialists, they probably weren’t thinking about people in Iowa and New Hampshire. But with Bernie Sanders’ decisive victory in the New Hampshire primary on February 8, to go with his tie with Hillary Clinton in Iowa, the most support so far in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination has gone to a self-described socialist. No, it’s not the same as the imminent working-class seizure of the means of production, but Sanders’ unlikely surge doesn’t show any signs of slowing. Sanders was always...

Sarah Reed was found dead in her cell in Holloway Prison, north London, on 11 January. In 2012 Sarah was the victim of police brutality when stopped by police on a shop-lifting allegation. PC James Kiddie was caught on CCTV grabbing Sarah by the hair and then punching her as she lay on the floor of the shop. The attack was so violent a fellow police officer gave evidence against Kiddie in court. The circumstances of Sarah′s death in Holloway prison are unclear. The Ministry of Justice simply reports that Sarah was ″found unresponsive in her cell″ and that ″prison staff attempted CPR″. The...

The campaign to stop Sadiq Khan being elected Mayor of London is starting to get a nasty, distinctly racist, anti-Muslim flavour. On 12 February the centre pages of the Evening Standard carried a double page spread with the headline “Exposed: Sadiq Khan's family links to extremist organisation”. “Extremist” is the word of choice in the anti-Khan campaign. It was also in the Sun ’s headline on 8 February, and is littered across the mainstream media’s web coverage. Zac Goldsmith preferred to call Khan “radical and divisive”, obviously with the same implication. Namely: Khan is linked to radical...

Following the first democratic national committee meeting for Momentum, the Daily Telegraph has published an attack, written by notorious right-wing hack Andrew Gilligan, on people elected from the meeting to the Momentum steering committee, as well as on the organisation more broadly. The article is full of lies and inventions, including a claim that the Momentum NC was appointed — when in fact, following some arguments in Momentum, it was elected by a more democratic process. Gilligan's attacks focuses on individuals. One Momentum Steering Committee member, as a student union sabbatical...

Veteran LGBT and socialist activist Peter Tatchell is no racist or transphobe, and we should defend him against those charges. His alleged racism and transphobia were the grounds on which an NUS LGBT officer refused to share a platform with him at the “re-radicalising queers” event at Canterbury Christ Church University on 15 February. The LGBT officer was, in their view, following the policy passed by the LGBT conference of the National Union of Students which could be read as obliging an officer of the union not to share a platform with an “oppressor”. Of course they are entitled to follow...

The government’s argument in their attack on junior doctors’ pay and conditions has been that they had a manifesto commitment to introduce seven-day access to all aspects of health care and that this was necessary to reduce excess deaths among weekend hospital admissions. The government’s approach seems to amount to forcing junior doctors to work more at weekends for less pay. But, unless they also force them to work longer hours, this must reduce the number of doctors on weekdays. If the original problem of excess deaths was due to a lack of junior doctors at weekends, the result would be to...

On Thursday 11 February, Tory health minister Jeremy Hunt announced that he had broken off negotiations with the BMA and would impose his new terms on junior doctors. The new contract, which Hunt plans to impose from 5 August, aims to force junior doctors to work longer and even more unsociable hours, especially more weekends (the “seven-day NHS”), with a slash in their wage of up to 30%. The new contract also removes barriers to prevent hospitals making their junior staff work overtime for no extra money. 14 out of 20 bosses of NHS Trusts, cited by Hunt as supporting the move to impose the...

“Les bruits lointains d’une atlantide disparue, de cette ville d’Ys engloutie que chacun porte en soi.” [The distant sounds of a vanished Atlantis, of that sunken city that everybody carries inside] - Ernest Renan. Souvenirs d’enfance et de Jeunesse. 1883. Ten years after the 1989-91 fall of Soviet-bloc Communism, Perry Anderson wrote, launching the Second Series of New Left Review (NLR) that, there was “no longer any significant oppositions” “within the thought world of the West”. The governing and intellectually dominant neo-liberalism had no rival on the radical left. Amongst the...

Herman Benson was a founding member, along with Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, and others, of the Workers Party, which broke from the US Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the British group of the same name) in 1940 following a debate about how to understand the Stalinist state in Russia. While the SWP majority maintained that the USSR remained some kind of "workers' state", however "deformed" or "degenerated", a large minority, which went on to become the Workers Party, argued that it was a deeply oppressive society based on a new form of class exploitation. They developed their ideas into...