Solidarity 402, 27 April 2016

As Solidarity goes to press on Tuesday 26 April junior doctors are starting a two-day, all-out strike with no emergency-cover. The strike is an escalation from previous strikes by junior doctors where they have provided emergency-cover. In these strikes it will be up to hospital managements to ensure that hospitals are safe and move consultants from other duties into emergency-care roles. This will cause delays to elective procedures that consultants would otherwise have been carrying out. The government has given its clearest sign yet that it sees this dispute as a fight over the future of...

Economic issues if Britain quits the EU? No problem, says the anti-EU Tory Michael Gove. We could be just like Albania. Bosnia, Albania, and Ukraine, as Gove said, have free trade with the EU without having to comply with EU rules. The Albanian trade unions, who in their May Day message ask the Albanian government for measures “in terms of rights and freedoms of association, labour relations and labour legislation, closer to that of the European Union”, have difficulty getting traction with the demand. Gove wants British unions to face the same prospect. The description that Albanian...

Maria Exall of the Communication Workers’ Union explains why unions must campaign for a vote to remain At CWU conference (24-28 April) we voted overwhelmingly to campaign with other unions for a distinctive workers voice in the debate on the EU referendum. This decision was not based on any defence of the indefensible about the EU but because a “remain vote” is in CWU members’ interests. The EU is in many ways a capitalist club with a neoliberal agenda, but so is this UK Conservative government. The EU certainly needs democratic reform so that our voice in the elections of our representatives...

The annual conference of the National Union of Students (NUS), which took place in Brighton 19-21 April, saw a further advance for the left in the student movement. Left-wing officers were elected and left-wing policy passed. The conference resolved to join with the junior doctors and other groups of workers fighting the Tory government. It voted to sabotage the National Student Survey, as a means of disrupting the government’s Teaching Excellence Framework, and marketisation of higher education. Conference demanded living grants for all students, funded by taxing the rich, and to support...

Instead of joining the junior doctors picket lines and backing the strike like junior doctors and Labour members have asked her to, Labour′s Shadow Health Secretary appears to have been spending her time organising a cross-party letter to Jeremy Hunt calling for a trial imposition of the contract. The letter, signed by Heidi Alexander, Conservative Dr Dan Poulter, Lib Dem Norman Lamb and the SNP's Dr Philippa Whitford and supposedly with the backing of the BMA (though it unclear through what mechanism), suggests that a limited ″trial″ imposition of the contract would allow evaluation of its...

Leon, on the left, picketing Oxford Circus station during a London Underground strike in August 2015. Leon Brumant, London Underground worker, RMT union rep, and socialist and anti-racist activist, died on Friday 22 April, aged just 30 years old. He is survived by Nailah, his young daughter. He was an inspirational organiser and a profoundly effective communicator, with a non-sectarian attitude to politics that saw him build links and win friends across the socialist left, inside and outside of his union. He served on the RMT's national Young Members Advisory Committee, and was my predecessor...

Introductory note. This article appeared in the London monthly of the Irish Workers' Group, “Irish Militant”, in May 1966. The author, Liam Daltun had been a member of the IRA who had taken part in the 1956 split in that organisation, siding with the faction led by Joe Cristle, which was impatient for “action” against the 6 County sub state. He took part in the “action” of November 1956, when they set fire to custom posts along the internal Irish border, which preceeded the “official” IRA Campaign that would start in December 1956. Eventually disillusioned with both of the IRA factions, he...