Talk, fed to the media, of "mass resignations" by junior shadow ministers if Jeremy Corbyn activates Labour Party conference policy and goes for a new public vote on Brexit (Guardian, 18 January 2019) - this is treachery similar to June 2016, only worse.
As we go to press on 15 January 2019, it is exactly the 100th anniversary of the murder of the Polish¬German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. She was killed by a right-wing militia operating under the Social¬Democratic government which was heading off the German workers’ revolution.
We have a pamphlet in production on Luxemburg and the German revolution. Readers can also find a good summary of Luxemburg’s political work in two articles, from 1935 and 1938, by Max Shachtman.
Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) General Secretary Manuel Cortes, a prominent supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, explains “Why I’m calling for a special Labour conference on Brexit” in an interview on The Clarion website.
According to the Financial Times (18 January), "Britain has failed to finalise most trade deals needed to replace the EU’s 40 existing agreements with leading global economies and will not be close to doing so when Brexit occurs on March 29, according to an internal Whitehall memorandum...
"Almost none of them are ready to go now and none will be ready to go by March,” said one government official who has seen the internal analysis of the Department of International Trade’s progress".
Merseyrail is one of the Train Operating Companies (TOCs), where workers have been resisting the imposition of Driver Only Operation (DOO), which involves the abolition of the safety¬critical role of the guard. Guards are represented by the RMT union, with drivers overwhelmingly members of Aslef. Among the TOCs, the Merseyrail is uniquely strong because it is the only one where Aslef drivers in large numbers have respected RMT guards’ picket lines. However, the Merseyrail industrial action has stalled for months now.
Last week Solidarity published an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn from Sacha Ismail, an organiser of the new Labour stop-Brexit campaign Labour for a Socialist Europe.
The conclusion of that letter becomes even more urgent after the parliamentary vote on 15 January. We say again to Corbyn:
Now you should campaign boldly for a “People’s Vote”, and advocate a vote against Brexit.
On Saturday 12 January, an estimated 84,000 people joined “Act IX”, the latest round of Gilets Jaunes demonstrations around France. Down from 300,000 back in November, but up from 50,000 on 5 January.
The Brexit crisis at Westminster is also rippling across the left in Britain. Although the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) remains committed to its pro¬Brexit position, its report of its conference on 29¬30 December show that at least some of its members are uneasy.
As of Monday 14 January, the US federal government has been partly closed for 24 days — the longest shutdown in the nation’s history. Federal agencies that provide services deemed essential are still running, but “nonessential” services, including those relating to scientific research, food inspection, and the maintenance of national parks, have stopped completely.
On 4 January, US president Donald Trump, in a rambling speech at a meeting of his cabinet, praised the USSR invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. “The reason Russia was in, in Afghanistan, was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there”.
“Despite being elected with over two thirds of the vote last May in an election given a clean bill of health by hundreds of international observers…” began the Morning Star’s editorial on 12 January, under the headline: “Venezuela is under siege – it needs our solidarity.”
Amber Rudd, the new Tory Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, has scrapped the plans to extend the two-child limit on Universal Credit for those with children born before April 2017. She has also postponed the next stage of Universal Credit roll-out, due to hit three million in-work tax-credit claimants within the next few weeks was postponed.
Introduction to a briefing, the PDF of which can be downloaded here.
Red London is a Facebook page which deploys unevidenced smears rather than political argument against people they politically oppose. Its administrators are anonymous.
Justine Canady is running as the left candidate for NUS President, challenging current President Shakira Martin’s move to suspend all NUS officer elections this year and shut down NUS democracy and campaigning, on the pretext of a financial crisis.
The outcome of the latest international climate negotiations, COP24, in Katowice, Poland, in December, has been widely condemned as completely insufficient by environmental organisations. Some early proposals would have aimed for a 30% reduction, but then reduction was made voluntary.
There were no collective commitments made to increase emissioncutting actions or ambitions. Commitments did not even align with the goals of the Paris Agreements of 2015, themselves widely recognised to be woefully insufficient.
By a London Teacher
A potentially very positive consequence of the ATL/NUT merger to for the National Education Union (NEU) is that it removed the barrier that the National Union of Teachers imposed on itself not to recruit non-teaching staff in schools. By doing so the possibility has been created of much more effective workplace organisation in schools.
The NEU now claims over 450,000 members, including a significant and growing number of non-teaching staff.
This article seeks to review and reflect on the two volumes of Rosa Luxemburg's Complete Works published so far.
Only a scattering - a much thicker scattering since the 1970s, but still a scattering - of Luxemburg's writings have been available in English until now.
Since the 1970s there has been a "Collected Works" in German. Even that misses out a lot. The new Complete Works, edited by Peter Hudis, will be fourteen volumes.
What a pre-Christmas treat the Morning Star gave us! More than a whole page given over to an anti- EU tirade under the snappy headline “Brexit offers the possibility for socialists to lead a political transformation – The immediate task before us is to leave the EU and break the constraints on democracy that it represents”. And if that wasn’t enough to stir the patriotic hearts of all loyal readers, the author closes with the clarion¬call: “No deal is the real deal and the left should unite in pursuit of that end.
“I think we need to respect the referendum. As I say, I think that there is a deal which can be struck within Parliament that brings everybody together, that respects the views and wishes of communities whether they voted Leave or Remain” —Rebecca Long-Bailey, Shadow Secretary for Business, Sky News, 16 December.
Comrade Corbyn!
On Saturday 5 January, an estimated 50,000 demonstrators came onto the streets of France to take part in “Act VIII”, the eighth national protest of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) movement. In Paris, a bloc of working¬class women in yellow jackets came to the fore and broke police encirclements. The movement has shrunk since “Act I” on 17 November 2018, which saw an estimated 300,000 on the streets, but it has defied predictions that it would die off during the Christmas¬New Year break.
The immigration lawyers’ association has described the Tories’ Immigration White Paper, published in December, as “a charter for the wealthy”. It threatens to fulfil the right-wing Brexit promise to extend to EU migrant workers the existing hostile treatment of their non-EU counterparts. Skilled workers, defined as those with the equivalent of A¬Levels and above, and earning over a salary threshold, will be able to apply for medium¬term work visas. The overall cap on numbers and the requirement for resident labour market tests will be removed for these workers.
On 15 January, the Trustee Board of NUS, the National Union of Students, will meet to vote to approve the calling of a Company Law meeting. This will be made up of an appointed person from each student union (likely to be the President or CEO). Our source says delegates will be encouraged to “attend” remotely and vote via email to guarantee no disruption from students.
Amidst farcical discord in the dominant Left Unity faction of the civil service union PCS, nominations open on 17 January for the union’s Assistant General Secretary. Voting will run from 16 April to 9 May.
International Socialism, the theoretical journal of the British Socialist Workers' Party, has run an anti-Brexit piece. This follows a debate on the issue at the SWP’s recent conference.
On 19 December, US president Donald Trump announced a snap decision to withdraw US troops from Syria. At first he said the troops would be out within 30 days, but now it looks like several months at least. The plan is now conditional on assurances from Turkey regarding the safety of the Kurds in Northern Syria.
Click here for longer version of this article.
In November, the PCS Independent Left (PCS IL) selected John Moloney, a genuine rank and file PCS activist with an outstanding campaigning and negotiating record, to contest the 2019 PCS election for Assistant General Secretary (AGS). Nominations open on 17 January, and voting will run from 16 April to 9 May.
Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott’s interview on Radio 4 Today, 28 December, marked a new, abject low in the Labour leadership’s timidity and triangulation over migration policy.
A sharp rise in migrants attempting to cross the Channel in flimsy boats and dinghies – a desperate, dangerous prospect that police have likened to “trying to cross the M25 at rush hour on foot” – saw forty people, including children, rescued from boats in the early hours of Christmas Day.
The Stansted 15 have spent their Christmas break awaiting sentence, having been found guilty under terrorist¬related legislation carrying a maximum life sentence.
On 28 March 2016, activists locked themselves onto the front wheel of a Boeing 767 that the Home Office had secretly chartered to forcibly deport 60 refugees and migrants to Nigeria and Ghana. They included a woman whose husband had threatened to kill her because of her sexuality and two people who have since been identified as victims of trafficking.
Fidel Castro’s 26 July Movement overthrew the corrupt Batista regime, and took power in Cuba sixty years ago, at the start of January 1959. The early period of the Castro regime improved social provision and living standards for the poorest in Cuba. Increasingly it did that while also suppressing the independent trade unions and political pluralism which existed, even though harassed and weak, under Batista.
Reposted from www.studentleftnetwork.com
The National Union of Students is about to be changed beyond recognition behind the backs of its membership. Elections for all officer positions are now suspended until after National Conference, completely overriding the constitution and democratic process.
NUS President Shakira Martin has given unelected student union CEOs and staff unchecked control over the NUS’s response to its £3 million financial deficit, a response which will curtail democracy and effectively end campaigning.
The working class is a global class. Refugees and migrant workers are our brothers and sisters, and we should unite with them against the bosses and plutocrats - who are also a global class, and even the most "British" of them hostile to us.
Openness to refugees and immigration has historically made countries richer both culturally and even economically.
Brexiter: "Migrants are a drain on UK resources, including benefits and NHS"
What were the formative developments in the economic crash of 2008? What does it tell us about the future of capitalism? What shaped the economic depression and turmoil since 2008? What light do the events shed on Marxist theories of economic crisis, and vice versa?
"Crisis and Sequels", edited by Workers' Liberty contributor Martin Thomas, was published in hardback in 2017, at a price accessible to university libraries, but is now available in affordable paperback.
In 2018 the Fire Brigades Union, which organises operational firefighters, fire control staff, fire brigade officers and others in the UK fire and rescue service, celebrated its hundredth anniversary as an independent union. For its centenary the FBU has published a book, Fighting Fire, about the last thirty years of its history.
Mark Fischer in his book Capitalist Realism outlines the titular concept, summed up in the phrase “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. In a recent Twitter outburst, this is the concept Novara co-founder Aaron Bastani reached for in retort to people reacting to his tweet about trade under a Corbyn-led Labour government:
A rebel in Gaza, behind the lines of the Arab Spring, by Asmaa al-Ghoul (pictured) and Selim Nassib is a short and easy-to-read book that should be read on the left.
For much of the British left Gaza exists only as an example of Israeli brutality; and Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Gaza, exists only as a group that fights Israeli bullying.
This book tells us about another aspect of the matter - what it is like to live as an opponent of Hamas, in Gaza, under a one-party religious state.
Theresa May’s Brexit mess shows that the whole Brexit business is a nonsense. Labour should say that.
Labour should campaign for an immediate putting-back of the Brexit date, an early general election, and an incoming Labour government to hold a “people’s vote” to abandon Brexit.
Whatever the hopes in June 2016 made a slight majority of a rigged electorate (excluding EU citizens settled here, who vote in local government elections, and 16-17 year olds) opt for Brexit, the reality is different.
The Brexit crisis is perhaps the most significant moment in politics in Britain for a generation or more. The internationalist, class-struggle socialist left must, within our capacities, intervene in that moment to articulate an independent working-class politics.
Solidarity goes to press soon after Tory prime minister Theresa May decided to delay the parliamentary vote on her EU withdrawal deal, maybe until January, and to seek “reassurances” from the EU to sweeten the deal. The deal would have been heavily defeated if put to the House of Commons as scheduled on 11 December.
In the closing speech at the Another Europe Is Possible conference on 8 December, Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle recommended Best for Britain as the group with which AEIP should combine to form a joint campaign in a new public vote on Brexit. Because the speech was right at the end of the conference, no one had a chance to point out that an amendment passed earlier in the day, moved by Ben Towse and insisting that AEIP must above all voice an independent left-wing line, contradicted this proposal. But it did.
On 29 November 2018, the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland published a report Engineering for Energy: a proposal for governance of the energy system.
The report explicitly does not “make any recommendations about what types and proportions of generation types should be used in the electricity system”, focussing instead on overall co-ordination of the energy system, with useful nuggets of insight.
The Crisis of Scottish Labour
A Survation opinion poll carried out in mid-November found that Labour had a 1% lead over the Tories in England and a 17% lead over the Tories in Wales. But in Scotland Labour was on just 23%, a poor third behind the SNP (40%) and the Tories (27%).
As with any opinion poll, the precise figures are open to challenge. But as far as Scotland is concerned, the figures reflect the experiences of many Labour canvassers on the doorstep. Two overlapping factors explain the polling figures for Scotland.
Workers’ Liberty opened our annual conference on 24-25 November with a session on the case for building a revolutionary organisation on the lines developed by the Bolsheviks in the period up to and during the revolution they led in 1917.
There is no short-cut to mass support. We have to build up, as the Bolsheviks did, from the basic tasks of developing our press, recruiting people one by one, doing “singlejack” agitation, striving to make our activities more accessible and outwardfacing.
Activists blocked bridges in central London on 17 November, and plan to do the same on 24 November, at the call of the new movement Extinction Rebellion. A volunteer with Extinction Rebellion spoke (in a personal capacity) to Mike Zubrowski from Solidarity.
Michelle Rodgers has been elected president of the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport workers (RMT), becoming the first woman president in the union’s history. She won a comprehensive victory, with 7,198 votes; her two opponents, Steve Shaw and Jamie Nickles, took 4,598 and 443 votes respectively.
On Tuesday 27 November 2018 over 100 Unite the Union reps from cargo handling, cabin crew, catering, cleaning, engineering, security, baggage handling and the fire service along with some Unite officers and organisers packed into a committee room in the House of Commons for the launch of a campaign across four major airports.
Peter Kenway is director of the New Policy Institute, and author of much research on local government. He talked with Martin Thomas.
Philip Alston’s recent report on “social calamity” in the UK focused on cuts in benefits. There have also been huge cuts in local government. What is their impact?
NEW: The story of a year of European revolutionary action.
The latest edition of On Guard, a socialist industrial bulletin for Sheffield rail…
TSSA General Secretary Manuel Cortes, a prominent supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, explains “…
According to the Financial Times (18 January), "Britain has failed to finalise most trade…
Talk, fed to the media, of "mass resignations" by junior shadow ministers if Jeremy…
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