Youth

Issues for young people

Young workers meet to discuss organising

Young workers and working students came together at Goldsmiths College on Saturday 12 May for ‘Student Worker Solidarity 2012’, an activist gathering organised by the Young Members Network of the GMB union’s Southern Region. Co-sponsored by Goldsmiths Students Union, Royal Holloway Students Union and social justice NGO People & Planet, the event aimed to share experiences, skills and resources for anyone involved in trade union organising in their workplace or on their campus (and, as is often the case, when those two places are one and the same). Bar workers employed by their own Student...

The police are racist!

On 30 March The Guardian published a video recording showing Mauro Demetrio, a twenty one year old from Beckton, East London, being subjected to racial abuse and violence by police officers in the back of a police van after his arrest during the riots in August 2011. In the soundtrack, one officer admits to strangling Demetrio and calls him a “cunt”. Another officer, PC Alex MacFarlane, can be heard justifying the assault because Demetrio would “always be a nigger”. A couple of days after the Demetrio recording, evidence was published that on the same day in August 2011, also in East London...

Stop jailing children!

During the riots many who would normally describe themselves as liberals or moderate socialists repeatedly Tweeted and updated Facebook with their own calls for the use of “any means necessary” to restore social order. If taken at their word, this would have meant the use of the full force of the state — police, police armoury, to disperse what people who were in many instances little more than children. Now things have now calmed down and the armchair generals have stopped panicking, the post-riot response of the establishment meets all their expectations — vindictive, hading out...

AWL summer camp 2011 report

By Sam Greenwood, Hull AWL Workers’ Liberty’s summer camp, the first we have organised, took place in Hebden Bridge, in West Yorkshire, on 19-21 August. 35 young activists, a mix of young workers, university and school students and unemployed people, took part in a weekend of political discussions, workshops and socialising. From the opening workshop on Marxist ecology to the closing rendition of the Internationale, the event was a success. Over the three days there were eleven workshops, ranging from a socialist attitude to imperialism and what this means particularly in Iraq and Libya, to...

Stratford No.1 RMT Branch passes motion on the riots

London Underground Central Line station staff from Holborn eastwards, drivers at Leytonstone, Hainault and Loughton, service control staff at Stratford Market depot, and bus workers at Leyton passed the following motion on the riots on Thursday 11 August 2011: There has been rioting and looting in London and spreading across the country. People in working-class communities have looked on with fear as riots destroyed local shops and left some people homeless. We do not support actions which harm working-class communities or attacks on firefighters or ambulance personnel. But these events demand...

Sex in the Big Society

Contrary to popular belief, the schools of Eton and St Paul’s, where members of our current Tory cabinet acquired their top-notch educations, were not rife with fagging, or even shagging. In fact, the whole Conservative lot, Nadine Dorries and Anne Milton included, abstained from sex entirely until they were well settled within the confines of marriage. Once there, they performed the ritual act a mere two or three times, to ensure children were conceived, and contraceptives (which they were happy to learn nothing about) were not used. But how, you’re almost certainly asking yourselves, do they...

EDL exploits teenage deaths

On 28 May the racist EDL held a demo in Blackpool. It was about two teenagers whom the police suspect had been sexually exploited prior to death. Why do the EDL care about these girls? Because the acquitted suspects are from Muslim backgrounds and the girls were white. Charlene Downes and Paige Chivers were both from Blackpool. Fourteen-year-old Downes disappeared in 2003. Her body has never been found, but it seems likely she has been murdered. A prosecution was brought against shop owners of Jordanian origin, but collapsed. Chivers was 15 and disappeared in 2007. No one has ever been charged...

Labour youth organise

A Young Labour activist writes about the left's attempts to fight Blairite influence within Labour's youth wing. Also included is a review of Roy Porter's London: A social history . Click here to download article as pdf .

RMT young members get organised

RMT Young Members held their largest ever conference on 25-26 February. Fifty delegates might not sound a lot for a union of 80,000 members, 11,000 of whom are under 30. But four years ago there were just nine delegates. Young RMT activists have worked hard to build the conference over recent years; this reflects increasing participation of young RMT members. The conference focused on the fight against cuts. RMT General Secretary Bob Crow described the Government’s cuts as an attack on the working class of historic scale: “This will be the first generation where parents leave behind worse...

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