Solidarity 566, 7 October 2020

Agenda for activists

As the virus spreads, Safe and Equal is stepping up efforts to get its model motion on isolation pay passed through Labour Parties and union branches. It also asks activists to seek invitations for S&E to speak at meetings. S&E has recently been approached with an invitation by a local Labour Party with which it had previously had no contact, and has had ongoing links with Redbridge Trades Council's drive to get Redbridge council to ensure full isolation pay in its care homes since an S&E speaker went to the Trades Council in April. The Uyghur Solidarity Campaign UK and Labour Movement...

Offshore energy and “just transition”

The environmental campaign groups Platform, Friends of the Earth Scotland, and Greenpeace have jointly published a report surveying oil and gas workers’ views about their working conditions, and the future of their industry in the context of the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis.

Social solidarity to slow the virus

The "local lockdowns" aren't working. The Tories' helter-skelter mess of virus-control measures may do more harm, by disrupting social solidarity, than good. Despite the Tories paying vast amounts to private contractors, and achieving high total test numbers, the virus test-and-trace system is nowhere near doing what it needs to do: identify infections and contacts promptly and get efficient quarantining. NHS workers are weary and resentful, denied the 15% pay rise which they have demanded. Elderly-care workers are mostly still denied isolation pay. Britain may be unique in the world in the...

Making anti-racism a union issue

Two years ago, activists in the Lambeth branch of the public services union Unison launched a campaign to fight institutional racism at Lambeth Council. We knew our employer had a huge race pay gap. We were hearing from our members that they were experiencing more racism at work, since the Brexit vote. We launched a survey and our black workers told us about their experiences of discrimination at work. The stats showed the same story. There were a disproportionate number of white workers in higher grades. You were more likely to face a disciplinary investigation at Lambeth if you were black...

Some gains at NEU conference

The National Education Union (NEU) held an online Special Conference on 3 October. Over 600 people attended, with around 550 delegates. Conference voted on various rule changes. They were not taken as a job lot, as I wrongly reported in Solidarity 565. The rule change to allow the General Secretaries to extend their tenure beyond five years, if they had announced they were retiring, was withdrawn due to rank and file pressure. In a significant victory for the left of the union, the proposal to reduce the executive from 70 to 55 failed to get the two-thirds majority required, following strong...

Another history of Corbynism

If I were Owen Jones, I would be rather annoyed that Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire got Left Out published before This Land: The Story of a Movement. When I read both, in the order of release, with Jones’s book I felt like I had read it all before. Jones, unlike Pogrund and Maguire, is a participant in the movement. He was one of the few columnists in the mainstream media to support the Corbyn leadership. He started his career working for John McDonnell and alongside Andrew Fisher. He makes clear in the book that he rates both of them highly. He sees McDonnell as Labour’s lost leader. But...

Democracy in the labour movement: Labour's NEC election

In a Huffington Post interview on 2 October, Keir Starmer said that the ten policy points of his Labour leadership campaign “were important pledges... and they remain my priorities”. But he’s not been heard to argue for them since being elected! Pressure to keep him to them can be raised by voting for left candidates in the National Executive ballot (19 October to 12 November) and pressing for a proper Labour Party conference (in-person, or online with voting) in early 2021. Unfortunately Richard Rieser, backed by Solidarity for the “disabled” NEC seat as having a stronger left record than the...

Hawkins-Walker: socialist candidates

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc . Workers’ Liberty supports Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker in the 2020 US presidential election: socialists, standing as the candidates of the Green Party. We also carry debate about that stance and on assessment of Trump. Below is how Hawkins and Walker sum up their pitch, from a statement on the hospitalisation on Donald Trump. Our campaign and the work of the Green Party has never been to isolate or target one politician. Behind Donald Trump is an army of Republicans who are cheering him on at every turn. Behind the...

Why socialists should not support Hawkins

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc . The golden age of the Socialist Party in the U.S. lasted about a decade. By 1912 the party’s vote peaked when Eugene Debs won 6%. It was downhill from there. After more than four decades of decline, the Socialist candidate Darlington Hoopes won just 2,128 votes nationwide in 1956. If 44 years of decline taught the Socialists anything, it was that maybe it was time to try working inside the Democratic Party, the party that most American workers – and their unions – supported. In 2016 and 2020, that idea was tested in reality...

Trump: not fascist, maybe pre-fascist

• See here for other articles debating the US election, Trump, etc . Thomas Carolan’s article in Solidarity 565 started “The President of the USA is a fascist”. The body of the article backtracked from that assertive opening, suggesting that Trump’s government is not fascist although it has strengthened those elements that may be quickly assembled by Trump into a fascist force, particularly the mobilisation of “a mass movement to beat down its enemies” in stealing the coming US election. Trump, Carolan continues, is fascist because he leads a “death cult” based on his macho posturing in the...

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