Europe

LETTER: EEA poor substitute

I was intrigued by the line in the editorial in Solidarity 472 , headlined “Build the left against Brexit”. It states Solidarity supports the PLP voting for amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill that would keep the UK in the EEA. Whilst this is an improvement on the prospect of a hard Brexit, I think it is the wrong approach to the question. The AWL has been raising the slogan of “Stop Brexit” and rightly so. Membership of the EEA is a poor substitute for full membership of the EU. EEA members must make budget contributions and accept regulations without having any say in decision making...

Labour should speak out against Brexit

On Wednesday 2 May, so the press has reported, the Cabinet will discuss proposing a “customs partnership” with the EU post-Brexit. Britain would routinely deal with imports from outside the EU as if they were coming into the EU — it would apply EU tariffs, and pass them on to the EU — and then fix exemptions for imports coming in for final consumption in the UK. Both the EU and keen-Brexiter Tories think this scheme technically unworkable. On 4 April an official cross-party committee of MPs proposed that Britain should go for European Economic Area status (effectively EU semi-membership, like...

Big rise in antisemitism since 2013

The year 2017 saw a 60% increase in antisemitic incidents in the USA, and a doubling of the number of cases of antisemitic harassment, vandalism, and attacks in schools and on college campuses. Over 1,000 of the 1,986 antisemitic incidents reported and collated by the Anti-Defamation League happened in schools or universities. The total number has been increasing since 2013, and is now over two and a half times its level then (bit.ly/adl-2017) . The rise parallels, and must surely be driven by, the surge in “America First”, anti-”globalist” feeling flagshipped by Donald Trump. Many nationalist...

Austrian protest against far-right coalition

On Saturday 13 January, tens of thousands of people braved pouring rain and cold to demonstrate in Vienna against the new conservative-far right coalition government, one of Austria’s largest demonstrations in recent times. The police estimated participation at 20,000; organisers had it at 70,000. Socialists from the Revolutionary Socialist Organisation and the leftwing coalition Aufbruch marched alongside school students, refugee organisations and the anti-fascist pensioners’ group “Omas Gegen Rechts”. Crowds chanted “long live international solidarity” and “Austria will not be conquered by...

Left must defend freedom of movement

After weeks of intense pressure from the Labour right (and from some supposed to be on Labour’s left), Jeremy Corbyn has retreated on freedom of movement. In a speech on 10 January he said: “Labour is not wedded to freedom of movement for EU citizens as a point of principle... Labour supports fair rules and reasonably managed migration as part of the post-Brexit relationship with the EU”. But the same day he told the BBC that he was not proposing new restrictions on the rights of people to move to the UK and does not think immigration is “too high”. In his speech Corbyn hinted that Labour...

Far right defeat in Austria

After almost a year of campaigning, voting, a second ballot, and a delayed re-run of the second ballot, the Austrian presidential elections finally came to an end on 4 December. With a relatively narrow lead of just 53.8 per cent, the Green Party candidate Alexander Van der Bellen was able to defeat the far-right Freedom Party’s Norbert Hofer. This is good, but it is in no way a victory for the left. While the neoliberal economist Van der Bellen was, not unlike Hillary Clinton, supported by a broad coalition reaching from the chairman of the conservative People’s Party and several high-ranking...

Ports and workers’ power

"The RWG [container] terminal [in Rotterdam, 2.35m teu capacity], with its fully automated cranes, is operated by a team of no more than 10 to 15 people on a day-to-day basis. Most of its 180 employees aren’t longshoremen, but IT specialists” (Journal of Commerce, 4 Feburary 2016). The managing director says: “We are in fact, an IT company that handles containers”. Compare: in 1900 the Port of London was the busiest port in the world. It had 50,000 workers shifting cargo mostly by hand, as they had done for thousands of years. It handled 7 million tons of cargo. “Teu” means “twenty-foot...

Europe: the Stalinist roots of the “left-exit” myth

The revolutionary left once had reputable politics towards Europe, an inheritance from Trotsky that was not finally dispensed with until the early 1970s. The story of how the British revolutionary left went from an independent working class stance to accommodation with chauvinism and Stalinist “socialist-in-one-country” deserves to be better known. Throughout the twenty five years between the beginnings of European bourgeois union in 1950 and the UK referendum of 1975, there were umpteen vicissitudes across the left. The one constant was the outright opposition to European integration from the...

Austria: far right surge and Green’s narrow win

On 22 May, the far right candidate for Austria’s presidency, Norbert Hofer, was defeated by the narrowest of margins. Hofer, candidate of the “Freedom Party”, stood on a strident anti-migrant platform, and was way ahead of other candidates in the first round of the presidential election on 24 April. He scored 35.1%. Alexander Van der Bellen, a veteran ex-Green running as an independent, who rallied a range of support to defeat Hofer on the second round, got 21.3% on the first. The candidates of the two parties which completely dominated Austrian politics for decades after World War 2, and...

More hopeful for Left Bloc?

The Solidarity 384 article on Portugal says the Portuguese SP is a “neo-liberal” party and seems to suggest that the Left Bloc shouldn’t have entered government with them. I think this misreads the situation. Whilst the Portuguese SP back in 2008-2012 implemented harsh austerity, the programme the new leader of the SP Antonio Costa ran on in this election is not neo-liberal. It seems straightforwardly Keynesian and social democratic. So they promised to match the Troika’s targets for reducing the deficit but Costa pledged to do this not through austerity but boosting disposable income to...

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