Solidarity 030, 14 May 2003

Protest for Chinese workers' leaders

By Peter Burton No Sweat is organising a picket of the Chinese consulate in Edinburgh to protest against the continued detention of two Chinese labour leaders, Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang. They have been detained since March 2002 for protesting against the non-payment of wages and benefits such as pensions to workers at the Ferro-Alloy factory in Liaoyang. * The picket will take place on Tuesday 27 May, from 4.00 at 55 Corstorphine Road, Edinburgh. Bring your banners!

Chinese worker activists jailed

By Paul Hampton Two leading worker activists have been jailed in China for helping organise some of the biggest protests in the country in the past 50 years. Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang led mass demonstrations last year in protest at unemployment and corruption in Liaoyang city involving 30,000 workers. The two men were charged with illegal assembly, marching and demonstrating as well as with "subversion". Yao was sentenced to seven years, while Xiao was ordered to serve four years. Despite a heavy police presence 300 workers demonstrated in support of the two men. China Labour Bulletin (CLB)...

Good prospects for trade union work

By Riki Lane and Janet Burstall The Socialist Alliance Australia conference, in Melbourne on 9-11 May, was very different to the English one. Some highlights were greetings from construction union leader Martin Kingham, a reception organised by the Workers' First group in the big manufacturing union AMWU, and participation as a conference delegate by the central leader of Workers' First, Craig Johnston, who is currently facing jail for alleged "violent" industrial tactics. Political discussion, however, was thin, with debate focused on the model of the Scottish Socialist Party (advocated by...

Breakthrough in Scotland

By Angela Paton The SSP made spectacular gains in the Scottish Parliament elections with six MSPs elected under the regional list system (a method of proportional representation). The Greens won seven seats. (There were 250,000 votes for the SSP and Greens in the list). Margo McDonald, former SNP, now independent, won, as did Dr Jean Turner, for the Save Stobhill Hospital campaign - who took the Labour-held constituency seat of Strathkelvin and Bearsden. Dennis Canavan was re-elected as an independent in Falkirk, with again the biggest majority in the Parliament. A pensioners' campaigner won a...

Burnley: BNP gains from Labour's failures

By Mark Catterall "Burnley, BNP capital of Britain" proclaimed the Lancashire Evening Telegraph on 2 May. This was the day after the fascist British National Party (BNP) increased the number of council seats it holds in Burnley from three to eight, making the BNP the second largest party on the council. Labour remains the largest party on the council with 23 councillors. However Labour fielded 16 candidates in the election and got 8,784 votes, while the BNP fielded 13 candidates, receiving 8,545 votes. With this kind of vote the BNP could take control of the local council within a couple of...

The case for revolutionary realism part 1

Susan Jackson and Jack Hamilton continue our debate on the unions' political funds, with a reply to John Bloxam and John O'Mahony's contribution in the last issue of Solidarity. We invite further contributions. "A party? inability to establish correct relations with the working class reveals itself most glaringly in the area of the trade union movement?The fatal excesses of the ?hird period?were due to the desire of the small Communist minority to act as though it had a majority behind it?No better favour could be done for the trade union bureaucracy. Had it been within its power to award the...

We owe George Galloway what the Trotskyists in 1940 owed and paid to Mosley's Blackshirts

"An injury to one is an injury to all" - and therefore socialists who opposed the recent Iraq war of the USA and UK should back George Galloway? It was put like that by Nick Wrack, the mover of a resolution committing the Socialist Alliance to support Galloway which the Alliance conference passed by a big majority on Saturday 10 May, against the opposition of supporters of Solidarity . The impulse to take such a stand is in itself healthy. So is the impulse not to "desert" Galloway. But serious politics is not just a matter of instinct. We, who have been at war with Galloway for a decade, who...

Study Bolsheviks critically

Two comments on Alan Johnson's discussion of how to unite the left ("Left Unity with the movement of movements", Solidarity 3/28) - one positive and one negative. The negative one is that I think he spins fantasies about the SWP. Having detailed a string of that group's political misdemeanours over the last twenty years, he then writes hopefully of "a snap-back, a coming-to-senses". But the SWP's degeneration has involved the destruction of huge swathes of political culture among its rank-and-file, and the closing off of any avenue by which the membership can influence the organisaton's...

An open letter to CPGB members

Recent changes in the so-called Communist Party of Great Britain have forced us to conclude that it is not a vehicle for the building of a revolutionary movement in Britain today. Many of these changes are abrupt and radical departures from the direction in which the organisation seemed to be going after its break in the mid-1990s from old-style Stalinist attitudes on what it called the "bureaucratic socialist" states and from vulgar "anti-imperialist" positions on Ireland and Israel-Palestine. Before and during the war in Afghanistan which followed September 11, the CPGB took a principled...

Parents and teachers tell Clarke: We don't want SATS

Education Secretary Charles Clarke faced an audience of concerned and angry parents in his local constituency, Norwich, on 9 May, as he attempted to defend the Government's policy on testing and targets in schools. Clarke admitted he hadn't expected such a large meeting at Parkside primary school. Perhaps he was under the impression that parents welcome their children being tested in more public examinations than any other children in Western Europe. Or that parents appreciate the results published in school performance League Tables. If so, he was about to learn the truth. One after another...

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