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Firefighters win Home Office appeal - more await justice
By Vicki Morris
Four Basingstoke firefighters have won their Home Office appeal against their sacking on charges of bullying. The four - Barry Kearley, Steve Dunbar, Bernie Ross and Dick Thoroughgood - suspended from duty in 1999, and sacked thereafter, have spent over four years trying to prove their innocence and get their jobs back.
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In solidarity with our favourite spinmeister, and in protest at his appalling treatment at the hands of the Beeb, Solidarity has given over this column to Comical Ali Campbell to give his spin on the latest News.
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Protest in Hong Kong against anti-subversion law
Around 50,000 people took part in a sit-in last week against the Hong Kong government’s controversial anti-subversion bill. The protest followed the 1 July demonstration when more than 500,000 workers and trade unionists marched to denounce the bill—the biggest protest in China since the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989.
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by Oona Swann
The workers’ fight goes on
“In the year 1831-32, there was a general movement of the working classes for an increase of wages, and the labouring men in the parish where I lived [Tolpuddle] gathered together, and met their employers, to ask them for an advance of wages, and they came to a mutual agreement, the masters in Tolpuddle promising to give the men as much for their labour as the other masters in the district… Shortly after we learnt that, in almost every place around us, the masters were giving their men money, or money’s worth to the amount of ten shillings a week — we expected to be entitled to as much — but no, nine shillings must be our portion. After some months we were reduced to eight shillings per week. This caused great dissatisfaction...
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Sean Matgamna continues his article on "the last time we were heresy-hunted" with a survey of the labour movement organisations and individuals who backed the campaign against Socialist Organiser (forerunner of Solidarity) in 1983 by the Workers Revolutionary Party, then a high-profile, pseudo-Trotskyist organisation with a daily paper with some influence in the labour movement, Newsline.
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By Sue Denham
The Branch Delegate Conference of the T&G was on the surface a boring affair. No dramatic conference arguments; composites were passed in almost every case with GEC endorsement. Excellent positions on asylum seekers and the organisation of migrant workers, no hint of a right-wing agenda.
Affiliation to the United Campaign for the Repeal of the Anti-Trade Union Laws (UCRATUL) went through with GEC recommendation and was passed as part of a comprehensive composite on anti-trades union legislation.
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By David Stamp, independent member of Birmingham Socialist Alliance
Whatever future the Socialist Alliance may have — and I’m no longer sure it even has one — it’s going to be an uphill struggle to recapture anything approaching a spirit of trust or unity within the Birmingham left following the antics on 1 July.
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From Workers' Left Unity-Iran
Over the last few weeks, the demonstrations and sit-ins organised by textile workers in Behshahr in northern Iran have come to symbolise the long struggle of the Iranian workers for the right to a decent wage, the right to work.
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Mark Osborn’s “alternative analysis” (Solidarity 3/32) of the Middle East “roadmap” misses all the important points.
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The Socialist Alliance can either continue on the road of class struggle working class politics, that is, on the course Solidarity and Workers' Liberty, together with others - not then the Socialist Workers' Party - set for it four years ago.Or it can adopt the cross-class popular frontist politics which the biggest organisation in the SA now, the SWP, advocates.
