Solidarity 067, 17 February 2005

Will profit wreck the Earth?

In January the International Climate Change Taskforce Report concluded that drastic action was necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and stave off immensely damaging and irreversible climate change. On 16 February the Kyoto Protocol on limiting emissions came into operation. We asked environmental campaigners for their evaluations and for their thoughts on alternative energy sources and use. Less spin please Dr Spencer Fitzgibbons, Green Party spokesperson on Climate Change We keep seeing official reports predicting disaster on climate change, but governments simply go on increasing...

Stop this race-hate auction

By Gerry Bates Tony Blair and Michael Howard are trying to win votes by competing to see who can promise the most vicious “hard line” against asylum seekers. This foul auction is boosting and nurturing the most dangerous prejudices. Never mind the facts. That refugees and immigrants, if they’re allowed to work, contribute more to the country’s economic output than they take out. That many essential services rely on immigrant workers. That Britain has benefited for centuries from the cultural enrichment brought by successive waves of immigrants and refugees. That very few asylum-seekers would...

Racist rhetoric fuels racist attacks

By Mike Rowley Three black men were racially abused and beaten up by a large white gang as they left a pub in Essex. A Zimbabwean student was repeatedly punched and racially abused by two white men in Clydebank. Two prison guards were sacked for urinating on a black colleague. These are the violent racist crimes reported today by the Institute of Race Relations . There are one or more new reports almost every day. Racist violence is an escalating problem in Britain. Political events are partly to blame. There has been an increase in racism against people of Muslim background since the...

Will the USA push Israel towards peace?

The Palestinian elections and the emergence of a new Palestinian government, the declaration of a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine, and what looks like a serious attempt by the US government to revive the long-stalled “roadmap for peace”, have revived hope for a settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Is it false hope? The publication of the “roadmap” in March 2003, backed by the USA, the UN, the European Union, and Russia, was widely hailed as a possible basis for peace between Israel and the Arabs. The roadmap advocated the setting up of an independent and territorially viable...

Fight to make the “super-union” democratic!

By Jim Denham The proposed creation of a giant new union, made up of the TGWU, Amicus and (probably) the GMB has caused much excitement and some misgivings within the trade union movement. The idea was hatched from lengthy and highly secretive talks between the TGWU’s Tony Woodley and Amicus’s Derek Simpson. Even the executives of the two unions knew nothing about it until a joint announcement from the two general secretaries on 2 February. The secrecy was probably necessary, given the extremely delicate nature of the negotiations, but it also served to fuel concerns about democratic rights...

Carlisle equal pay case

Unison has claimed victory in a landmark sex discrimination case which could see hundreds of NHS staff in Cumbria win thousands of pounds of back pay. But the case may be far from over. Unison’s press release of 14 February said they had “won £300m for women working for North Cumbria Acute NHS Trust” and suggesting that the Employment Tribunal had finally ruled in the workers’ favour. This isn’t entirely true. Following several weeks of negotiations with the Trust, Unison’s national officers say that they reached agreement “on all substantive matters”, which would provide “compensation” for...

Challenge to Gilchrist

Matt Wrack, a militant activist from the London region, has been elected as the Fire Brigades Union’s (FBU) new Assistant General Secretary, and will soon challenge Andy Gilchrist for General Secretary position. Wrack received 6,260 votes, John McGhee (the leadership’s favourite) won 5,527, and “middle ground” candidate Dean Mills got 1,981 votes. While many members of the union remain disheartened and demoralised (the turnout, at around 25%, was low for an FBU national election), there is a developing movement for radical change within the FBU. Wrack’s victory follows that of rank-and-file...

Writing on the wall

Welcome to Ruritania A big stir was provoked in Mediaworld last week by the news that Charles Windsor, aka “the Prince of Wales”, and his partner, Camilla Parker-Bowles, are to marry in the spring. For a few days all other news, even the crisis in Iraq and the imminent General Election, was driven out of the papers. There is, to paraphrase Macaulay, nothing so ridiculous as the British press in one of its periodic fits of sycophancy. Some difficulty has been caused in some backward quarters of the land by the fact that Ms. Parker-Bowles is a divorcee. The Church of England will not marry the...

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