Solidarity 440, 31 May 2017

“Jeremy Corbyn has said that terror attacks in Britain are our own fault,” claimed Theresa May on Friday. “I want to make something clear… there can never be an excuse for terrorism, there can be no excuse for what happened in Manchester.” It is a measure of the cynicism — and desperation — of the Tories and their press that Corbyn’s speech this week has been attacked in this way. Corbyn did refer to British foreign policy as a factor in any explanation of terrorism, but only in similar terms to many commentators, and indeed some Tories. What Corbyn actually said was: “Many experts, including...

NCAFC activist Cosmo Seamus explains why the Labour Party’s manifesto commitment to free education and a National Education Service is important and badly needed. Currently, England is the most expensive country to study in the world. Since the 2010 Tory-LibDem higher education (HE) reforms there have been cuts to government funding, an expansion of the student loan system and of course the famous trebling of tuition fees to £9,000. These sets of changes have been come together with an overall neoliberalisation of universities: more casualised labour and decreased pay and pensions for workers...

The fact that the perpetrator of the Manchester bombing, Salman Abedi, may have been part of a Daesh network in Libya has focused attention on the group outside of its main territories in Iraq and Syria. Daesh is known to have groups allied to it across the Middle East, Africa and Asia but in recent years their strength has grown in Libya. The fall of Gaddafi lead to a series of fractured and splintered militias and rival governments fighting for control. The roots of Daesh in Libya lie with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, formed in the 1990s from remnants of the mujahideen who fought the...

A central part of the Labour Party’s response to the Manchester atrocity has been to emphasise its call for more police officers — and now also more intelligence personnel. Labour is also promising more prison guards and borders agents. With a lead from Momentum nationally, wide swathes of left-leaning Labour activists have picked up this narrative. In many cases comrades go beyond arguing the Tories are hypocrites to agitate against Corbyn on terrorism when their police cuts have made us less safe, to positively advocating more police and even sometimes using slogans like “support our police”...

PCS, the civil service union, held it′s national conference in Brighton 23-25 May. Workers’ Liberty supporters, organised as part of the left-opposition faction, "Independent Left" within the union were delegates. Going into conference with victories in the NEC and Bargaining Group Executive elections. The industrial landscape the union finds itself in is dire, and the leadership's response to it has been inadequate, but not surprising for a leadership infected with the broad left strategy of fusing with the bureaucracy we’ve had in PCS for the past 16 years. The union, despite those years of...