Solidarity 3/121, 8 November 2007

Solidarity 3/121 in pdf format

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Download pdf here (see "attachment"). The front page calls for working-class unity against New Labour's call for "British jobs for British workers" and the Tories' anti-immigrant campaign; the back page, for solidarity with the left in Pakistan and for a no vote in the CWU postal workers' ballot. Inside: Defend Karen Reissman; Iran; world credit crisis; LRC conference; abortion rights; National Union of Students democracy campaign; Respect split; and much more.

Mr Galloway: Mixing business and politics

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Author: 
David Broder

Gorgeous George by David Morley

Given his colossal ego, z-list celebrity status and continuing admiration of Stalinist politics, it is hard to imagine a better candidate for biography than George Galloway. However, those who deduce from David Morley’s chosen title, “Gorgeous George”, that the book is irreverent or cutting will be greatly disappointed.

Respect in Tower Hamlets

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Author: 
John Bloxam

The first act of the four SWP-allied councillors who have split away from the main Respect opposition group in Tower Hamlets was not to launch a high-profile campaign aimed on any of the many issues which affecting workers in the borough — for instance the threatened transfer of council housing to an ALMO. After the SWP’s noises about breaking from the “ineffectiveness” and “communalism” of Respect in Tower Hamlets, surely this would have been an appropriate course.
Instead it has been widely reported that the new group of Respect (Independent) councillors — Ahmed Hussain, Lutfa Begun, Oli Rahman and Rania Khan — have begun talks with the Liberal-Democrat councillors to form a new opposition coalition!

1969: Ireland and the British Left part 4 — When “militant” sloganeering meant promoting communal war

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Author: 
Sean Matgamna

The last three issues of Solidarity have carried Sean Matgamna’s series about the British left and the events in Northern Ireland in 1968-9 — arguably the biggest internal crisis the British state has seen since the early 1920s. The last article (Solidarity 3/120) summed up the turning-point debate at the National Committee of IS (forerunner of the SWP) in January 1969, and the initial positions mapped out by the IS/SWP majority and by the Trotskyist Tendency within IS (forerunner of Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty).

1917 + 90 — Leon Trotsky: All power to the soviets!

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This is the 90th anniversary of the Russian workers’ revolution of November 1917. Since the fall in 1991 of the Stalinist regime which eventually overwhelmed the workers’ government and made a counter-revolution in the 1920s, more has been available to researchers in the west. Some new books have advanced our understanding of the revolution. None, however, can match the exciting exposition of the course of 1917, in Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution