Solidarity 593, 19 May 2021

"Spontaneity with roots": how protest blocked deportations in Glasgow

Paul, a socialist activist in Glasgow who took part in the successful action which stopped an immigration raid on 12 May, spoke to us about what happened. At some point that morning a Home Office van appeared in Kenmure Street in Pollokshields, and took two men out of their flat and bundled them into a van. I don’t know who saw it first, but a lot of the activist community in Southside is clued into issues around the Home Office and asylum-seekers. There’s a tradition in recent years of resistance to the eviction of asylum-seekers. Someone made Facebook posts to tell their friends to spread...

Might-have-been-man: Cliff Slaughter

Memories of Cliff Slaughter, who has died at the age of 93: 1: A school of the Socialist Labour League (SLL), Manchester, 1961 or 62. Slaughter is a leading writer of the SLL. He has written a couple of articles on the theory of the revolutionary party, which many people (me included) think very highly of. He has been talking about the iniquities of the Stalinist movement, in which he had spent over a decade of his youth. Someone asks him how he could have failed for so long to see through Stalinism. He explains it as his failure to think through his sometimes critical ideas to the necessary...

Covid: no time to ease off

Several scientists have warned that the lockdown-easing on 17 May, allowing pubs and cafés to reopen indoors, risks new spikes and should have been postponed. Even the Tories hint that the 21 June date for further and almost total easing may be put back. With good cause. The Economist magazine has just made the first attempt at a comprehensive count of worldwide excess deaths. Ten million. The official figure of Covid deaths, 3.4 million, undercounts the toll especially in countries with poor recording of deaths. The weekly world Covid death rate is still almost at its highest ever. Chile and...

Two occupations end, student protests continue

The student occupations at Sheffield Hallam and Manchester Universities have ended, due to heavy-handed attempts by university management to criminalise the protests, and a refusal to engage with their demands. The students leave with their heads held high, however, as their three week long protest has demonstrated how to militantly oppose the marketised higher education system. The fact that universities still remain able to resist these immediate demands does not deter students from promising to continue with radical tactics. The campaigns that have emerged around fee and rent strikes this...

Marching for Moulsecoomb

Hundreds of parents, kids, workers and supporters braved the rain to march from Moulsecoomb primary school to a rally at The Level in Brighton on Saturday 15 May, demanding that the school remain in local authority control. Despite overwhelming opposition, the Department for Education is persisting in trying to force Moulsecoomb to become an Academy. Under Tory laws building on New Labour’s Academies policy, it does not matter if workers, students, parents, the local council and community all oppose Academy status — as they do in the case of Moulsecoomb — it can still go ahead so long as there...

A strike against bullying

Maintenance workers at housing charity St. Mungo’s have been on indefinite strike since 22 April. They are striking against management bullying and the suspension of a union rep. Unite union officer Steve O’Donnell spoke to Solidarity . The company is refusing to agree to an independent investigation into bullying in the workplace, and our rep remains suspended, so the strike continues. The management culture in the company is intimidating and overbearing. Workers report being given unrealistic deadlines and unmanageable workloads. One worker, who has breast cancer, missed a chemotherapy...

Battling biscuit closure

Members of the GMB union will be demonstrating outside of the McVitie’s factory in Glasgow on Saturday 22 May (from 10am, at Tollcross Park: Facebook event here ) in protest at an announcement that it is to close. The factory has a workforce of nearly 500, with union membership split 3:1 between the GMB and Unite. Although the protest was initiated by the GMB, Unite members will also be supporting it. McVitie’s is owned by the Pladis company, which is part of the Turkish investment firm Yildiz Holdings. According to Pladis, it needs to close the plant and shift all production to English plants...

Diary of a Tube worker: “Why not just tell us the info?”

“Red means stop. Yellow means slow down and green means proceed. Really it’s as simple as that... Now some signals you need to do a certain speed for them to clear and some will almost always clear as you approach them but they might not so you need to be ready to stop. If you are motoring into a red signal, you’ve got a problem” “Hit a platform at a certain speed and you’ll be fine, you can crawl in for now but once out on the road you’ll want to keep to time. Then the routes will just become second nature and you’ll get used to driving in different weather conditions and then you’ll be fine”...

Liverpool University strikes on job cuts

Staff at Liverpool University are set to strike for three weeks over a management threat to cut 32 posts in Health and Life Sciences. The action, organised by the University and College Union (UCU), will run from 24 May to 11 June and follows an 84% vote for strikes in a ballot last month. It is timed to hit end-of-year exams so as to put maximum pressure on management. Campaigning has already reduced the number of posts under threat from 47. Meanwhile, staff at Leicester University have begun action short of a strike, also over job cuts and restructuring that has targeted multiple union...

A film from the GDR

Making a — very loose — connection to Bruce Robinson’s review of the Deutschland series ( Solidarity 592), and jumping back a few years, the GDR (which acquired the great UFA film studio when Germany was divided) once made some interesting films, even though much of this output now lies neglected and relatively unknown. My selection is a 1957 film, Berlin: Schoenhauser Corner , directed by Gerhard Klein. The ‘corner’ in question is a series of railway arches at Schoenhauser station on the Berlin overhead railway. Here disaffected teenagers, rebels and misfits congregate to look for some relief...

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