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The Marx Memorial Library’s annual oration at the grave of Karl Marx will be given, bizarrely, by Minister Ma Hui a senior official from the Chinese Embassy in the UK. The Chinese government is by no stretch of the imagination Marxist or socialist.

Janine Booth introduces her pamphlet '1919: strikes, struggles and soviets'

Available to buy here.

Sometimes the starkest warnings come from events that don't take place. In this case, the warning came from Honda's decision to turn back a ship destined for the UK. It was the arrival that never happened. But its significance runs far beyond Honda's current vehicle production in Swindon, Nissan's plans for manufacturing in Sunderland, Toyota's plant in Derbyshire or BMW's production of the new Mini at Cowley, Oxford.

See also A "plus" where the MSM put a "minus".

Chris Williamson MP told a meeting of Sheffield Momentum on 23 February that on antisemitism: “We’ve backed off far too much, we’ve given too much ground, we’ve been too apologetic.”

Get a copy of our new pamphlet, Remain and Rebel here.

Goldman Sachs is reported to be calculating on the basis of a 90% probability of Brexit being delayed or not happening at all. As we go to press on Thursday 7 March, the Tory-supporting Daily Telegraph says that Cabinet ministers now expect another defeat on 12 March.

A new pamphlet from Workers' Liberty summarises our arguments on Brexit, Europe, international solidarity, free movement, immigration, and how to build socialist politics cross-borders.

40 pages A4. Cover price £4. With postage - non-UK £6, UK £5. Cheap rates for bulk orders: four for £15, ten for £35, twenty for £60. Buy online with the PayPal button below.

Jon Lansman talked to Solidarity.

You've said that the concern about antisemitism in the Labour Party is based on realities, not something contrived or invented. Why do you say that?

Because I've seen loads and loads of cases at the National Executive, and I know them to be real. I also know that those cases are very rarely to do with Israel-Palestine.

A new pamphlet from Workers' Liberty, "The German Revolution: Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg", has Rosa Luxemburg's major articles from 1918-19.

56 pages A4. Cover price £5. With postage - non-UK £7, UK £6. Cheap rates for bulk orders: four for £18, ten for £40, twenty for £70. Buy online with the PayPal button below.

Ideas for Freedom 2019
20-23 June 2019

Advanced earlybird tickets now available.

Facebook event

A festival of socialist ideas and leftwing discussion, hosted by Workers' Liberty, Ideas for Freedom is an opportunity to explore, through talks, film showings, workshops and debates, ideas about how our world works, and how we can fight for a better one.

A socialist feminist publication produced by Workers' Liberty. March 2019.

Includes: Women Fighting Stalinism, Edith Lanchester nd 'free love', Social Reproduction Theory, Transphobia and materialism, Women and the alt-right, The socialist roots of International Women's Day. Click here to download

Above: Gregson with Rabbi Aharon Cohen of Neturei Karta, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group which is vehemently anti-Israel and argues that Jews "deserved" the Holocaust

Shop steward Peter Gregson’s appeal against expulsion from the GMB trade union was rejected last Wednesday (6 March).

Last year a GMB disciplinary hearing had concluded that Gregson had:

• Written and promoted antisemitic materials which were racist in nature, including claims that Israel “exaggerated” the Holocaust.

Listen to Solidarity 498 on Soundcloud

Alan Simpson, environmental adviser to John McDonnell, wrote rightly in Solidarity 497 about the hope we can draw from the international school climate walkouts, the next one of which is on 15 March. He rightly criticised almost all politicians, and most of the left, for failing to respond seriously to the climate emergency. However, I think the solutions he sketches also fall far short of what is needed.

On Tuesday 26 February, Deliveroo couriers in Manchester struck from 11 a.m. onwards, demanding better pay and other demands.

They have the same core demands as in many places across the country — £5 per delivery, paid waiting time at £10/hour, £1 per extra mile travelled – plus some extra demands. They have been supported by Manchester IWW. This was the second strike in a fortnight, following the Valentine’s day strike which was part of a nationally co¬ordinated strike, in turn inspired by a series of strikes in Bristol which had started to spread elsewhere.

AWL member Daniel Lemberger Cooper’s victory in the recent [2012] elections at the University of London Union (2-9 February) was won in the teeth of a large campaign, orchestrated by the SWP, branding Cooper a “racist” on the grounds that he is “a Zionist”, i.e. he defends Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself, while also supporting the right of the Palestinians to an independent state of their own alongside Israel.

Our criticism of Jeremy Corbyn's politics is not of yesterday. From 1978, and through the early 1980s, Jeremy Corbyn wrote frequently for Socialist Organiser, a forerunner of Solidarity. The picture above shows him on the platform (to the right) at a conference organised by Socialist Organiser in September 1983, the same month as the political exchange of opinions reprinted below.

Dear comrade Corbyn,

How has the crisis that grips the new, new Labour Party on antisemitism come about? How has it come to be the major scandal it is now?

It is thirty years since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, partly based on the life of the founder of Islam, Muhammad, sparked protests across the Muslim world, with riots in India and Pakistan in which dozens of Rushdie's fellow Muslims were shot dead, book burnings on the streets of Britain, and ultimately an Iranian death sentence which sent its author into hiding under armed police guard.

GMB Scottish Regional Secretary Gary Smith was accorded front page coverage in the 3 March 2019 “Herald on Sunday”.

Billed as an “Exclusive”, the article in fact consisted of some extracts from an interview with Smith conducted by one of the pro-independence paper’s resident right-wing journalists, Paul Hutcheon.

Hutcheon is still remembered for his notorious witch-hunting ‘articles’ about the Falkirk Labour selection contest and Grangemouth Ineos dispute of 2013 (although he has written no shortage of articles in a similar vein since then).

Rumours that Honda was about to announce the closure of its Swindon plant, with a loss of 3,500 jobs (up to 10,000, including the supply chain), began circulating on Monday 18 February. The next day it was all over the front pages of the serious bourgeois press.

The long-running campaign for equal pay for Glasgow City Council women workers, finally settled in February 2019, is on the agenda of the Scottish Labour Party annual conference, taking place in Dundee on 9-10 March 2019.

A motion submitted by the Scottish Labour Women’s Conference – tabled at that conference by the GMB, which represented many of the low-paid women – notes the resistance to equal pay for local authority women workers, “including during years of Labour power”.

The crisis of parliamentary politics over Brexit is one of the biggest such crises ever.

There is ferment in the electorate at large and especially in the Labour Party on the issue. The outcome remains very open. At least some delay of Brexit beyond 29 March is likely.

Those facts set the frame for what the 9 March conference of "Labour for a Socialist Europe" can hope to achieve.

On Monday 25 February, the Labour Party leadership came out for a new public vote on Brexit. Shadow Brexit minister Keir Starmer and shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry have said they would vote Remain in that referendum.

Review of In Defence of Bolshevism, £12 including UK postage. Purchase here.

Mass socialist parties, trade unions, workers councils and organs of struggle are places for debate, discussion, deliberation and opposition, where, ideally, everything is openly evaluated. Their functionality requires constituencies free to transmit their will to the administrators of power, not only within these organisations themselves but also to the broader institutions and arenas in which they participate.

Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu has persuaded two far-right racist parties to merge in return for offering them government posts if he wins the Israeli general election due on 4 April.

One of the two parties is Jewish Power, a scarcely-concealed continuation of the Kahane movement which has been banned in Israel since 1988 as terrorist and racist. It advocates expelling Palestinians and Israeli Arabs who refuse to swear “loyalty”, and an expanded Jewish state taking in the whole West Bank.

Derek Hatton used to be famous. In the mid-1980s he was the chief figure in Liverpool’s Labour council, embattled against the Tories. Formally deputy leader of the council, he was able to be the main public figure because he was promoted by the Militant group (forerunner of the Socialist Party), which then had decisive influence in the Liverpool labour movement.

Backbench Labour councillors in Birmingham have condemned their own leaders in a letter demanding that the council leaders “step back” from confrontation with two unions. The protesting councillors include several senior figures such as former council leader Albert Bore.

The Student Left Network’s first national conference will take place on 2-3 March at Sheffield Hallam University.

Left wing students from campuses across the country are getting together to decide how we can link up and spread our campaigns, where we should take the student movement next, share experiences and skills and debate political ideas.

Workshops will include

• how to organise student-worker solidarity campaigns, led by University of the Arts London Justice for Workers’ campaign

As an experiment we will be recording our weekly newspaper and making available for listening. This will be available on this website and on our SoundCloud account. (soundcloud.com/workers-liberty)

The audio version of Solidarity 497 can be found here.

And the audio version of Solidarity 496 can be found here.

The Observer newspaper on 17 February reported that the Government is “attempting to embed immigration officers at a rate of almost £60 an hour as part of an ‘enhanced checking service’ being offered to public services, understood to include NHS trusts and local authorities, as well as private firms.”

The Tories’ Brexit Immigration Bill is set to exclude workers from the EU unless they have a job in advance at over £30,000, or come for a specific job only for twelve months.

In the second case, workers will be banned from reapplying until another year has passed. In other words, obstacles will be built to those migrant workers settling, integrating, and organising in the labour movement.

On 7 February, France recalled its ambassador from Italy, the first time this had happened since Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini declared war in 1940. The recall was the latest act in a growing row between French President Emmanuel Macron and Italy’s coalition government, formed of the populist Five Star Movement and the far-right National League.

The Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) movement, now fourteen weeks old, drew thousands of protestors onto the streets of France on 16 February. Although the latest demonstrations fell short of the estimated 50,000 who came out the week before, the movement shows little sign of stopping.

Occasionally, just occasionally, there are weeks full of silver linings. The one that saw Britain's first nationwide schools climate strikes was definitely one of them.

When Greta Thunberg began her lone climate protest outside the Swedish Parliament last August she was not to know that, within 6 months there would be 70,000 pupils a week, across 270 towns and cities worldwide, who would be joining her. Their message was simple: "Wake up! There's a climate emergency."

If you had followed the week's debates in Britain's Parliament you wouldn't have guessed.

On 9 February, over fifty activists from across the country attended the official launch of Neurodivergent Labour at a meeting in London. The term “neurodivergent” refers to the condition of being cognitively atypical, e.g. autistic, dyslexic, dyspraxic, or Tourette’s.

Seven right-wing Labour MPs quit on Monday 18 February. They did not join another party or form a new one. They did not call on their rank-and-file supporters within Labour to quit.

Two Tory MPs sceptical about Brexit, Nick Boles and Sarah Wollaston, face deselection by their local Tory parties in coming weeks, and a Government minister has openly said that the hard-right Tory MPs “are not Conservatives” and should join the new “Brexit party” being launched by former Ukip leader Nigel Farage.

After a still unexplained period of silence on Brexit following the 29 January parliamentary votes on the subject, the Morning Star has found its pro-Brexit voice again.

Responses to Sean Matgamna's article in Solidarity 497. That article can be found online here. It has caused some debate within Workers' Liberty and beyond, and has been widely read online.

Shamima Begum, the British-born 19-year old who went to Syria to join Daesh at the age of 15, should be allowed to return to the UK.

Her support for the sectarian clerical-fascist Daesh is to be condemned. But to deprive anyone of legal rights, as to imprison them, should be done only after charge and fair trial, not by decree of a government minister anxious to placate an electorate in a nationalist mood.

She is a British citizen, and so is her baby son. Even people convicted of horrible crimes after due process do not have their citizenship withdrawn.

On 19 February, 16 US states announced that they were combining to sue the administration of President Donald Trump over Trump’s decision to declare a “national emergency”.

Tens of thousands of young people joined the Youth Strike for Climate school walkouts on Friday 18 February in town centres and outside schools across the UK. It was organised as part of the Fridays for Future school walkouts started by Swedish school student Greta Thurnberg, which have now gone global.

“Because the attacks on Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are certain to continue and escalate, it is essential that anyone who wants to be considered ‘progressive’ come to their defence now.”

Mass protests in Sudan have been ongoing since December 2018. The rising cost of bread and fuel has sparked calls for “Just fall – that’s all” against President Omar al-Bashir and his ruling National Congress Party. Leaders of nine opposition parties have been arrested.

Alcohol [see Martin Thomas’s article in Solidarity 494, and Stephen Wood’s letter in 495] is the most harmful psychoactive substance we know in terms of overall mental and physical damage, addiction, crime and costs to the economy and communities.

Labour right-wingers have chosen this moment to help out the hard-pressed Tory government. They have turned up the volume on the murmured speculations about a right-wing split from Labour just as the Tory impasse worsens. Labour and trade union activists want unity to maximise the chances of using the Tories’ thrashing-round to oust them from office, to force an early general election, and to get a new public vote to stop Brexit.

Let's get the bad news out of the way first. Whatever happens, Brexit is going to dominate parliamentary politics for at least another year, maybe more. No matter how bored you are by it, no matter how tempted by the thought, "Oh, sod it, let's just jump and get it over with", the nightmare still has years to run.

On 7 February, bosses at the Drax power plant, near Selby in North Yorkshire, announced they had started using “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) to remove carbon dioxide from the plant’s emissions.

Pic: The Warehouse Workers' Resource Centre marches with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights on May Day 2018 in Southern California

Review of "Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain", edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness

The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach employ about 14,000 dockworkers, with the number fairly static as throughput has risen. The whole logistics industry around those ports employs over 500,000, with the number increasing.