Workers' Liberty

Tory candidate for mayor of London Boris Johnson unveiled his transport policy on March 3, including a promise to obtain a no-strike agreement on London Underground as well as the capital’s train services. This policy, echoing an earlier UK Independence Party manifesto pledge, further demonstrates the utterly reactionary agenda of the ex-public schoolboy Henley MP, who appears to have a serious chance of winning the election against Ken Livingstone.

“Red” Ken Livingstone’s campaign for re-election is being supported with a high profile statement signed by... trade union militants? left activists? anti-cuts campaigners?

The recent survey of all the existing evidence for the effectiveness of the anti-depressants of the type made famous by Prozac has demonstrated how easily drug companies can get away with cherry picking studies that highlight the effectiveness of their drugs whilst hiding any negative results.

The survey revealed that none of these drugs had an effect better than a placebo in any but the most depressed patients.

On the 29 February members of the PCS union in the Department for Transport (DfT) took strike action over low and unequal pay, jobs and privatisation.

The strike had a great impact:

Lambeth council wants to increase council tenants’ rents by 6.5%. This is far higher than the increases in other boroughs and equates to around £250 a year extra for the average property.

A statement from “Defend the Five” Campaign —
This campaign has been launched because of the attack by Unison’s leadership on four London branches and five officers of these branches.

Solidarity spoke to Steve Hedley, the newly elected Secretary of the RMT union’s London Transport Regional Council. The union is currently gearing up for a number of important fights.

Recently there have been a number of strikes and protests in local government in response to settlements of Single Status Agreements.

On Wednesday 5 March 450 members of Unite union who work at Shelter struck for the first time in the housing charity’s 41 year history. A Shelter worker explains the background.

Contradictions inherent in New Labour’s policy of increased diversity and “choice” in school-provision have surfaced again over admissions to state secondary schools.

At an AWL meeting in London on 28 February, Faryal Velmi spoke about Pakistan after the recent elections. In those elections the two main opposition parties — the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N) — topped the poll and will have a dominant presence in the next parliament.

A student in Afghanistan downloads a report on women’s rights from the internet; he is arrested and sentenced to death for blasphemy by an Islamic court. This happened not under the Taliban but in October last year, under the pro-Western regime of Hamid Karzai.

The class struggle in Egypt, rising since 2006, has reached a new pitch in the last few weeks.

On Sunday 16 February, more than 10,000 workers from the Misr (Egypt) Spinning and Weaving Company textile mill in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla el-Kubra, north of Cairo, staged a mass demonstration against prices rices, low wages and the regime of Hosni Mubarak, joined by thousands more working-class people from the town. The Mahalla workers’ action was followed by similar, smaller-scale actions and protests by workers across Egypt.

The brief Turkish invasion of the autonomous Kurdish north on Iraq at the end of February is evidence, above all, of how far Iraq is from a liveable political settlement five years after the US/UK invasion of the country.

Turkey has some 15 million Kurds, mostly living in the south and east of the country, near the borders with Iraq and Iran. Although repression of the Kurds in Turkey has slackened recently, Turkey has a longstanding hostility to Kurdish self-assertion, and especially to Turkish-Kurdish guerrillas who base themselves in remote mountain areas of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Iraqi LGBT have recently obtained new video evidence highlighting the brutality of the Badr Corps and police treatment of LGBT people in Iraq. It shows LGBT people being arrested, held in custody and having their heads shaved and taunted with songs of hate and revenge.

The first video shows two gay men celebrating a wedding ceremony when they are stopped at a checking point between Al-Kut and Baghdad and violently pulled out of their car.

Hezbollah were among the organisations represented at the “World Against War” rally in Friends’ Meeting House, London on 25 February, with the Stop the War Coalition seeing fit to give a platform to the clerical fascist Lebanese militia.

SWP: bad times

The National Union of Students conference is taking place on 1-3 April, with the right wing threatening to close down all of the union’s remaining democratic structures with their ‘Governance Review’. The Education Not for Sale network, which has played a prominent role in the fight for a democratic union, is standing candidates for four positions in the full-time elections as well as one for the part-time ‘Block of 12’ posts.

In the last month, Sussex University (in Brighton) has seen hundreds-strong meetings of students and education workers to oppose the anti-democratic, pro-business “reforms” being pushed by the university’s management team. The first mass assembly of the Sussex Education Not for Sale campaign was attended by over 160 people; the second, by more than 300.

Louise Gold spoke to Graham Thompson from Plane Stupid, whose recent action on the rooftop of the Houses of Parliament was widely reported.

On 21 February, around 100 students from the University of Nottingham and the local area took to the campus grounds in a demonstration demanding their basic democratic right to free speech.

The demonstration followed a number of recent protests at the University where this right had been denied. One of these involved the arrest of a member of the Palestinian Society for “breach of the peace”. The University authorities had called the police while he was protesting peacefully against the abuse of human rights in Palestine.

It’s very simple. We want to see social change in the world in which we live. We want to see this social change because we are human beings who have ideas. We think, we talk, we discuss, and when we’re done thinking and talking and discussing, well then, we feel that these things are vacuous unless we then act on the principle that we think, talk and discuss about. This is as much a part of a university education as anything else. - - Jack Weinberg, Berkeley Free Speech Campaigner

Review of Who Runs Britain? How the Super Rich are Changing our Lives by Robert Peston (Hodder and Stoughton)

“No nation”, Frederick Engels once wrote, “will put up with production conducted by trusts [i.e. big, industry-dominating cartels], with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend-mongers...

It’s over 60 years since Orwell wrote the essay Politics and the English Language —yet its warnings are as relevant now as they were then. Orwell argued that the decline of the English language as a useful tool reflected the political conditions of his time. But it was an inexorable process. He thought the abuse could be stopped. He believed journalists had a particular responsibility amongst writers to show their dissatisfaction.

This drama about a 1960s New York advertising agency is a full-on period piece. Its attention to historical detail, clothes, manners, dialogue, is very acute.

From the mid-1890s, British socialists tried to unite under one umbrella. Tom Mann, as Secretary of the Independent Labour Party, was at the centre of the negotiations and debates that took place between the ILP and the Social Democratic Federation. These moves, popular with the members, were scuppered by the leaderships, mainly that of the ILP.

Russian and East European Stalinism collapsed in 1989-91. It was replaced not, as socialist had hoped, by working class rule, but by the capitalism of the state-looting oligarchs.

The catastrophic escalation [of the Israeli army in Gaza] comes after a long period of struggling between Israel’s military and Hamas. Due to its commitment to the US imperialism and its loyalty to the Bush administration which carries forward the Road Map plan, Israel refused to acknowledge the Islamic rule in Gaza strip and accept the Hamas proposal for Hudna, ceasefire, which meant recognition of Hamas rule.

I welcome Les Hearn’s participation in our nuclear debate, particularly as I remember reading about climate change in his science column in Socialist Organiser as long ago as 1988-89. However he completely evades the central problems with nuclear (Solidarity 3/127, 21 February 2008).

The minority argue that the only principled line on the conflict, and only chance to build independent working-class forces, is to stand sharply opposed to US-UK intervention in the region as well as Islamism. In contrast, the majority argue that we should acquiesce to the occupation of Iraq, since if we demanded that the troops leave and they did, Islamist militias would win out and crush democratic space in Iraq.