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by John O’Mahony
That’ll teach me to make silly jokes! A few issues back, in a fit of self-indulgent whimsy, I mocked some ex-comrades of ours who had abandoned socialist politics to enlist in George W Bush’s neo-conservative crusade to bring bourgeois democracy and American-style capitalism to Iraq. In a little skit, I had one of them confuse the Communist Manifesto with “the Bourgeois-Democratic Manifesto”.
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The crisis between Iran and the US entered a new stage with the election of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to the presidency of the Islamic Republic last June. Amina Saddiq looks at the background
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The government is in a panic. Its criminal justice policy is in chaos. At the same time a Chief Constable publicly denounces them for pandering in their decisions to the demagogue tabloid press. And he’s right.
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By Joan Trevor
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose vicious immigration reforms have now passed both houses of the French parliament, has softened his stance not one iota, in spite of what it says on the BBC news website about him having relented: “Mr Sarkozy plans to spare about 1,200 children who faced expulsion and deportation with their families.”
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Three hundred thousand marched into Oaxaca, Mexico on 16 June, to support striking teachers whose encampment was brutally attacked by police two days earlier. Led by Section 22 of the SNTE teachers union, the march was supported by university students, local health and university workers and numerous other union, popular and left wing organisations.
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By Mickey Conn
Over the last month, Chile has entered the stage of the social struggles sweeping Latin America, with hundreds of thousands of secondary students striking and occupying their schools.
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One recent poll (Ipsos/ MORI, 30 May) gives only 26% satisfied with Tony Blair as prime minister, and 67% dissatisfied. His negative ratings are much worse than even at the height of the big demonstrations against him taking Britain into the US-organised invasion of Iraq in 2003.
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By Gerry Bates
Members of the GMB union working in Asda Wal-Mart depots have voted by three to one to take strike action to win collective bargaining rights at all 20 distribution depots, to ensure the payment of the 2005 bonus and to have safe working practices.
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By Mike Fenwick, Unison
Announcements of cuts in the NHS have become routine— each day the newspapers find a new story to highlight increasing debt, job losses and closures. Yet the unions seem to be standing on the sidelines, with no concerted national campaign in place to respond to the crisis.
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By a conference delegate
Unison conference, meeting in Bournemouth between 17 and 23 June, posed both problems and possibilities for serious class-struggle activists in the union.
