Solidarity 3/169, 19 March 2010

The British Airways cabin crew dispute is hugely important. BA boss Willie Walsh’s attempts to deregulate, de-skill and casualise the BA workforce will not be an isolated attack — it will be part of a widespread, generalised offensive by bosses to break the backs of well-unionised workforces that have won stable pay and conditions.

Counterfire was launched on International Women’s Day. Throughout the website a lot of work has been done to assure the appearance of gender equality and to foreground the women’s struggle. Photographs of picket lines, for example, carefully show as many or more female workers than male ones. This sounds like PR nonsense but it is important: to develop as a socialist feminist entity in action as well as name, Counterfire, like all of us, must guard against the possibility of misinterpretation.

Following its failure to organise protests in Glasgow (in November last year) and Edinburgh (in February this year) the Scottish Defence League (SDL) announced that it would be holding a “respectful vigil” in Lockerbie on 27 March. The SDL’s decision to opt for a “vigil” in Lockerbie was a confession of weakness: lacking the confidence to try to organise an event in an urban centre, it chose instead to try to stage a stunt in a town of just over 4,000 inhabitants in the Scottish Borders.

Jill Mountford, who is standing as a Workers’ Liberty candidate in Peckham and Camberwell, spoke to Solidarity about the politics behind her campaign.