Solidarity 436, 26 April 2017

The intense election activity, drawing in a lot of people who have not yet come to meetings, has the potential to alter the longer-term shape of the Labour Party and the labour movement. We can make it a much broader movement of activists, with local parties having deeper roots in communities and a higher level of political activity. We also need to ensure that all sections of the labour movement — Momentum groups, union branches, Labour Clubs, Young Labour groups — and all activists are mobilised. In the first place Labour needs every activist it can get! In addition to launching a membership...

Lindsey oil refinery dispute, 2009 (discussed below) At best, Hannah Sell’s article “Brexit and the left” ( Socialism Today , the magazine of the Socialist Party, Issue 207, April 2017) is a series of platitudinous banalities. At worst, it is a wretched concession to nationalism. In a rare direct polemic against other group on the left (the Socialist Party prefer to plough their own sectarian furrow, acknowledging the existence of other tendencies only occasionally), Sell makes a number of claims about Workers’ Liberty which range from the distorted to the straightforwardly untrue. She accuses...

Turkish socialists Marksist Tutum comment on the results of the Turkish referendum. The big cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Antalya, Denizli, Diyarbakir, Adana, Mersin and Eskişehir, where the working class is concentrated, said no to the one-man regime in the referendum held on 16 April. Half of the population did not want the one man regime, despite the fact that all the state’s resources were mobilised to win the referendum and democracy was suppressed. Democratic rights were suspended, all opposition groups were suppressed, and their voices were reduced. In the cities where the...

Since April 2017 NHS Trusts have been obliged to check patients’ ID, with a view to determining their immigration status, before giving them treatment. Since 2014 certain migrants — those who do not have indefinite leave to remain or are not here on a temporary or student visa — have to pay 150% charges for secondary care. These charges will now to be expanded to primary and emergency care and those who cannot pay will to be reported to the Home Office. Many of the people targeted for charging are refugees — some of the most vulnerable, and poorest. Yet the government says it wants to recoup...

On Friday 21 April, the US state of Arkansas carried out the first in a series of four executions, all scheduled before the end of the month. Ledell Lee was killed at the age of 51, after more than 20 years on death row; his was the US’s seventh execution this year, and the first to take place in Arkansas since 2005. The remaining inmates are, at the time of writing, scheduled for execution within a week. It must’ve been a harrowing final few hours for Lee, who was granted a temporary stay of execution minutes before he was supposed to be put to death. It took less than five hours for that...

Report on first-round result, Colin Foster, Solidarity 436 Comments from the French left after the first round Two views on the second round, from Solidarity 436: Martin Thomas; Ira Berkovic and Michael Johnson Discussion document 1 (Martin Thomas) Discussion document 2 (Ira Berkovic and Michael Johnson) Discussion document 3 (Miles Darke) Further comments on the FN and the French second round (Martin Thomas) Four more contributions: Tony, Rosie, Duncan, Sacha Some quick responses: Martin Thomas "You can't claim it's a one-off": Duncan Quick response: Martin Emmanuel Todd: Martin *** Report on...

Left-wing activists, and those who are not yet activists, should throw themselves into campaigning for a Labour victory in the 8 June General Election. Workers’ Liberty members, including those expelled from Labour by the party bureaucracy, will be out campaigning. If you’d like to work with us on that, get in touch . Whether or not you’re a Labour Party member, you should get active campaigning; if you haven’t joined, now is the time to do it. We understand that many of those enthused by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaigns feel disappointed or frustrated by how things have gone...