Solidarity 037, 25 September 2003

By Rhodri Evans On 14 September Sweden voted 56% to 42% against joining the euro. The Social Democratic government, the main opposition parties, and the major newspapers all favoured the euro. But the voters rebelled. Blue collar workers, 18 to 30 year olds, and the people of small towns in the north of the country all voted strongly to keep Sweden's separate currency, the krona. The Swedish result makes it much more unlikely that Tony Blair will go for a referendum on euro entry in Britain any time soon. It also signals trouble for the European Union. The EU is drafting a new constitution...

By Joan Trevor The European Anti-Capitalist Left (EACL) has had six meetings coinciding with EU summits. The first was in Lisbon in March 2000, the most recent in Athens in June 2003. The next is planned for November. This body was initiated by the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) (France), Red-Green Alliance (Denmark), Left Bloc (Portugal) and the Scottish Socialist Party. Groups involved now include the Socialist Workers' Party and the Socialist Party (as observer) from Britain and Rifondazione Comunista (Italy) which joined in June 2002. The initial ambition to constitute itself as a...

By Sacha Ismail The first European Education Forum took place in Berlin on 18-20 September. The event, initiated and largely organised by the German-based Education is Not for Sale Network, was generally agreed to be a great success. Five hundred people attended: mostly students, but some educational and other trade unionists (the first thing you saw on entering the conference centre was Hackney NUT's Blair Peach banner); about half were German, but there were significant numbers from other European countries. Fewer than a dozen Brits showed up. They included two right-wing NUS hacks who had...

By Jack Cleary The romantic 19th century song lamenting "old Robert Emmet, the darling of Erin", is still widely known and sung today - two hundred years after the public executioner hanged the 25-year old Emmet, cut him down alive, disembowelled him, and then chopped him up before a gawping crowd in Thomas Street, Dublin. It was the last terrible act in the drama of the first Irish republicans, the United Irishmen. Robert Emmet was the younger brother of a famous United Irishman, Thomas Addis Emmet. The United Irishmen, founded by Wolfe Tone in Belfast, was an underground, oath-bound...

On 11 September 1973 a bloody military coup in Chile ousted the Popular Unity government of President Salvador Allende. Allende was killed defending the Presidential Palace during the coup. Workers in the factories attempted to defend themselves against the military attacks - but they were not sufficiently organised or sufficiently armed. They went down to defeat. As the new military regime of General Pinochet attempted to establish itself, hundreds of thousands of working-class militants and political activists were tortured and killed. The football stadium in the capital city, Santiago, was...

Now that the mainstream parties agree on most important issues, politics in the media is reduced to a sub-species of sports commentary. Journalists ruminate wisely on this politician's performance, that one's new "position", this other one's charisma or lack of it. Reporters ask people in the street what they thought of this politician's recent speech, in terms of his "performance", if they think that one's recent shift in "position" has really made his party more "electable". Politics? That is politics! Policy? (Eh?) That is policy! The "left" naturally has its own version of the "politics is...

The flat facts of 1967 are that on 19 June the Israeli cabinet decided to propose peace with Arab states on the basis of guarantees for Israel's security and withdrawal from the Golan Heights and West Bank (or most of it). On 28 August-2 September 1967 a summit of Arab states adopted a policy of "no recognition, no negotiation and no peace with Israel". Some of the Arab leaders actually wanted to negotiate. The Israeli government wanted to keep East Jerusalem and Gaza. That Israel has shown much obduracy over the years, and that we should consider the rights of the Palestinians indefeasible...

The flat facts of 1967 are that on 19 June the Israeli cabinet decided to propose peace with Arab states on the basis of guarantees for Israel's security and withdrawal from the Golan Heights and West Bank (or most of it). On 28 August-2 September 1967 a summit of Arab states adopted a policy of "no recognition, no negotiation and no peace with Israel". Some of the Arab leaders actually wanted to negotiate. The Israeli government wanted to keep East Jerusalem and Gaza. That Israel has shown much obduracy over the years, and that we should consider the rights of the Palestinians indefeasible...

Dan Nichols, Romford Sean Matgamna claims in one of the two pieces he wrote on Israel/Palestine in the last issue of Solidarity that Israel offered to pull out of the occupied territories in exchange for peace with the Arab states in September 1967. As far as I can work out, this is not true. Israel did make an offer to the US to pull out of some of the territories that it had occupied in the Six Day War in June 1967, but this offer was never communicated to any of the Arab states and was formally abandoned by the Israeli cabinet in October of that year. Crucially, the West Bank and the Gaza...

Mark Osborn, south London Re: the debate on the 'road map'. Perhaps it would help if I try to briefly state how things stand. An editorial in Solidarity (29 May) stated that the Bush people claim to have started a "democratisation and stabilisation of the Middle East As regards the Palestinians [the road map] is a test of the US's ability at 'nation building'. If the Americans do not force the Israeli government to genuinely accept a 'sovereign, independent and viable' Palestinian state, then they will fail It is in the US's interest to find a viable solution the Americans may, therefore be...