Workers' Liberty

If China's Stalinist bureaucrats hoped the Olympic torch relay would draw attention away from their crackdown in Tibet, they must now be sorely disappointed. As the torch paraded through London on 6 April, its bearers were met by a succession of protesters, some of whom attempted to snatch and extinguish the flame.

One of Gordon Brown’s last acts as chancellor was to introduce a new “tax simplification” scheme.

A House of Lords Committee headed by former CBI president, Lord Vallance of Tummel, has attacked the government in a report "The Economic Impact of Migration".

It is time for the trade union movement to face facts with New Labour.

Over 150 people turned out on Saturday 22nd for a protest against the deportation of Iranian gay 19-year-old Mehdi Kazemi.

The second trade union and communities conference against immigration controls (London, 29 March) brought 150-200 activists together to organise a coordinated national campaign.

As British teachers are mobilising for a historic strike, their French counterparts are engaged in a bitter struggle of their own, in the face of a ferocious government attack and a scandalously timid union leadership.

Unions have slowed London Underground’s drive to casualise its workforce -but by avoiding mistakes, they could have stopped it.

RMT members learned with great sadness of the untimely death on Sunday 6 April 2008 of Greg Tucker, secretary of RMT’s Waterloo branch since 1993 and of the union’s National Conference of Train Cr

Birmingham City Council workers will strike again on 23 and 24 April over the council’s plans to use “single status” negotiations to cut pay and jobs.

For the first time in its history, the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers debated a motion submitted by LGBT teachers from their own conference.

On 29 March the University and Colleges Union Left met in London. Around 60 lecturers discussed the way forward for the left in the union.

Several weeks overdue, the health service Pay Review Body finally made its recommendation to the government on 4 April — three days after the rise should have been implemented.

The 2008 National Union of Teachers (NUT) conference was unlike any other in the recent past. The difference? For almost a year NUT activists have been preparing the ground for the first national strike in over two decades. The attack on teachers pay and the unions' industrial response to it shaped the opening days and determined the mood of the rest of conference.

Comrades outside Italy could have been forgiven for thinking, on hearing in January of the fall of the government of Romano Prodi, that finally the forces of the so-called “Radical Left” in his centre-left coalition had said “enough!” to the eighteen-month or so of sustained attacks on the living standards and quality of life of the popular masses of Italy.

On 14 March, Venezuelan police — the “Bolivarian National Guard” — attacked a demonstration of striking steel workers from Latin America’s biggest steel works, the SIDOR factory in Ciudad Gu

Costas Lapavitsas is a Marxist economist specialising in the study of financial systems. His writings include the chapter on money in Anti-Capitalism: A Marxist Guide (edited by Alfredo Saad Filho), and he is a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Interview by Martin Thomas

Come to the Reclaim the Campus conference on 17 May to discuss the way forward for the student movement!

On 1 April, the National Union of Students conference in Blackpool narrowly voted to reject the NUS leadership’s “Governance Review”, which would have abolished what little democracy remains in our union and institutionalised its conversion into a pro-government lobbying organisation.

In her reply to David Kirk’s criticism of the Solidarity 3/128 editorial on Israel/Palestine, Cathy Nugent comments on the idea that we should not put demands on bourgeois governments:

Q. You’re writing a polemic for the AWL “majority” position on Iraq against “the minority”?

A. It falsifies the debate to put it that way. For a start, “the minority” have different views among themselves. The final revised proposal on Iraq for AWL conference submitted by David Broder and two other AWL people differs seriously — in politics, not just literarily — from what David wrote in Solidarity 3/128.

Review of A Thousand Splendid Suns, a novel by Khaled Hosseini

Dedicated to “the women of Afghanistan”, this book tells the tale of two women, Mariam and Laila, as they grow up in the thirty or so years of bloody wars and coups that have defined Afghanistan’s recent history.

Continuing a series on the history of the blues

How should student and labour movement activists respond to fascists being given a platform to speak — in student unions for example? Do normal considerations about “free speech” not apply?

For earlier articles in this series, covering the breakdown in 1968-9 of the old Northern Ireland political system — the biggest crisis in the UK state for many decades — and the reactions of the left, see www.workersliberty.org/node/10010.

Since October last year, London No Sweat, has been holding regular pickets of Tesco stores in the East End, exposing the exploitation that lies at the root of Tesco’s bumper profits and focussing particularly on workers’ struggles in Bangladesh.

The ISO is linked to the SWP. We do not agree with much of the analysis, particular the comrades' call to critically support the MDC, and will respond in the next issue of Solidarity, but we print their call as an act of solidarity.

On 1 April the NUT National Executive received the results of the ballot for a one day strike to protest at the continuing cuts in teachers’ real pay. When the result was known there was no hesitation in agreeing to call the action on 24 April. Indeed the vote to proceed with a strike was unanimous.

With strikes, demonstrations and direct action the Greek workers can overthrow the Tory government (Nea Dimokratia) and get the anti-working class reforms withdrawn.

This is a longer version of this article than in the printed paper.

Forty socialist candidates will be standing in the local government elections on 1 May, under the umbrella of the Socialist Green Unity Coalition.