Solidarity 044, 22 January 2004

By Martin Thomas At a West Midlands Socialist Alliance meeting on Wednesday 14 January 2004, Stuart Richardson of Resistance accused Jim Denham of Solidarity and Workers' Liberty of supporting the US and UK troops in Iraq. He repeated the accusation despite Denham immediately heckling him to say it was not true. It isn't true. Two recent front-page headlines of Solidarity, issues 3/30 and 3/41, and many articles, have stated our opposition to the US/UK occupation of Iraq. We demand that Stuart Richardson withdraws the accusation and apologises, and that Resistance repudiates it. In the meeting...

By Vicki Morris In December 2003 more than 200 workers at Pizza Hut in France struck a deal with their management, after mounting a month of strikes. The details are not public yet. Last autumn the company decided to franchise out its French restaurants, a move that would mostly likely lead to even less respect for workers' rights. The move helped to galvanise the workers. The workers' demands included: 10% pay rise for all No malicious sackings Respect for trade union rights A "13th month" pay bonus for all workers. One of the strike leaders and a representative for the trade union CGT...

The Socialist Alliance, the Respect Unity Coalition and the future of the left On 25 January, short of a political miracle, a tarpaulin will be pulled over much of working-class socialist politics in England. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and a large part of the activist left will sign up the "Respect" coalition as their political vehicle for the coming months. Its politics: a bland collation of sops for various constituencies (peace, green, Muslim, trade-union). Its figurehead: George "I need £150,000 a year" Galloway. Marx and Engels called the Communist Manifesto communist, not...

Clive Bradley continues our series on Iraq after the war George W Bush's plans to take a back seat in Iraq before the US presidential election in November 2004, leaving it in safe Iraqi hands, are coming unstuck. There were mass demonstrations in Basra on 15 January 15 supporting the call of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for direct elections; 100,000 later marched in Baghdad. The US plan was to transfer sovereignty to a Parliament elected not by universal suffrage, but from local "notables" (tribal chiefs and others) by the end of June this year. This would draft a constitution, and then full...

By Michaela Colins Remember the justification of the US-led invasion of Iraq (and earlier Afghanistan) as "liberation"? And the subtext, in the new American century, that the US, and its fawning supporters like Blair, would bring progress and enlightenment to the benighted Arab masses? So what to make of this: "This will send us home and shut the door, just like what happened to women in Afghanistan," said Amira Hassan Abdullah, a Kurdish lawyer. "...the law of the tyrant Saddam was more modern than this new law." On 13 January 2004 the Iraqi Governing Council passed law No 137, behind closed...

"It is difficult to think of another intellectual who has had such a real and visible effect on the political climate of their country since the war" said Perry Anderson in his 1988 essay on Norberto Bobbio, the Italian democratic socialist and political philosopher who died on 9 January. Bobbio was a liberal socialist, part of an Italian tradition of radical liberalism represented most notably by the great Piero Gobetti, murdered by Mussolini's fascists in 1926, but also Carlo Roselli, Guido Calogero and Aldo Capitini. From 1942 Bobbio was involved in the radical liberal Partito d'Azione. He...

By Lindsey Collen for LALIT (Struggle) Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, is one of the biggest US military bases outside the USA itself. To clear space from it, the people of the islands were deported by the British government, the former colonial ruler. A group of socialists from Mauritius are now sailing on a ship to Diego Garcia to demand the removal of the base and the people's right to return. Please ask your trade union branch, student union, Labour or SSP MP, union leader, etc. to send a message of support. Email to: lalitmail@intnet.mu or write to LALIT, 153 Main Road, Grand River...

Faryal Velmi visited Pakistan recently and talked with Farooq Tariq and other activists of the Labour Party of Pakistan (LPP) The LPP was established in 1997. With a Trotskyist-influenced leadership, the party has now around 2,000 members across Pakistan and is the main leftwing party in the country. Farooq told me that the LPP has taken a lead role in attempting to rebuild and bring together the country's fractured workers' movement against the neo-liberal agenda of President Musharaf, who took power in a military coup in 1999. The public sector has been restructured and privatised, resulting...

I read with interest your article about the headscarf in France in Solidarity (3/43). I would like to make some comments. First a point of detail, which nevertheless has its importance. Teachers who are members of Lutte Ouvrière and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire have fought for the expulsion of the Lévy sisters in a high school outside Paris, in the working class district of Aubervilliers. The two young girls had decided to become Muslims and to use the headscarf issue to rebel against their Jewish atheist father! Your article mentions the LCR but forgets to mention that Lutte Ouvrière...

Nick Holden's review of Michael Moore's new book, Dude Where's my Country (Solidarity 3/43) is too generous. Here are a few lines from Moore's book: "There is no terrorist threat. There is no terrorist threat. You need to calm down, relax, listen very carefully and repeat after me: There is no terrorist threat. There is no terrorist threat! THERE...IS...NO...TERRORIST...THREAT!" Large parts of the left, and entire swathes of European public opinion, are in deep denial about the terrorist threat. I am not talking about that pro-tyrant left that has sold its soul to "anti-imperialism" and so...