Solidarity 3/70 is online
Solidarity 3/70, of 31 March 2005, is online. Read the articles here .
Solidarity 3/70, of 31 March 2005, is online. Read the articles here .
From the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI) . Students at the University of Basra went on strike for over a week in March. They organised demonstrations outside government buildings in Basra. The strike and demonstrations were about a vicious attack on Basra students by the Islamists in the city. On 15 March a group of armed militia belonging to Al Sadr in Basra attacked a group of students from the Engineering Faculty on an picnic outing in one of the city's parks. While police stood by the armed thugs launched a vicious attack against the students, destroying all their...
Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain have increased the pressure of religious authorities on the upcoming General Election by backing Catholic archbishop Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s call for new restrictions on women’s access to abortions. Sacranie said: “We welcome [Tory leader] Michael Howard's stance which we hope will reduce the number of abortions that occur in this country.” Sacks added: “Clearly the time has come to reconsider our stance on abortion, and give weight to the right of the unborn child.” These religious figures are not responding to...
At the recent National Union of Teachers conference, delegates voted to fight the Government’s planned expansion of the Academy programme. Academies are publicly-funded independent schools, new schools built in “deprived” areas or where schools are deemed to be “failing”. Businesses and other sponsors, including religious organisations, donate towards the cost of building a new school — the current price is £1.5 million. That is often a fraction of the overall cost (less than 10%). The schools are then handed over to the sponsors to run, although they do not have to pay the running costs. Many...
Michael Howard’s summary execution of Howard Flight, the Tory MP who talked candidly about the Tories’ tax and spending plans at a private meeting, has prompted a storm of protest in the Tory Party. Tory Party members are apparently not used to such “firm leadership”, nor diktats from the centre. They are used to pottering around their leafy constituencies, networking over sherry. Maybe that is why the Tory Party has such a high quota of eccentrics and mavericks. Now Michael Howard has decided the laid-back, decentralised ways have to change. He wants to do what Tony Blair has done to the...
Two socialists comment on the Zimbabwean elections which take place on 31 March Brian Stephens, Green Left Weekly, Harare Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party — the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) — is confident of victory in the country’s general elections. Mugabe is now looking ahead to regaining the confidence of international capital and attracting new investment to revitalise a devastated economy. As cleaner elections would help to legitimise Mugabe’s rule, the electoral laws have been liberalised, access to the state media has been relaxed and the...
Kat Pinder describes a three-day protest outside Baxter Detention Centre for refugees, which is situated in a remote part of Australia. On Wednesday 22 March I left Perth and set out on a 41-hour coach journey across the Nullarbor desert to Baxter Detention Centre. I have only recently moved to Australia and the trip was a good introduction to the country. But my reason for embarking on such a journey (and I thought Manchester to London was bad) was to take part in a three-day Easter weekend demonstration to end mandatory detention for refugees and asylum seekers in Australia (including...
In the Guardian on 26 March, Tariq Ali, who back in the late 1960s and early 70s was perhaps Britain’s best-known Marxist, called for a “tactical vote” for the Liberal Democrats in the General Election likely on 5 May. Because the Liberal Democrats have become much more left-wing? On the contrary, they have been carefully “re-positioning” themselves as business-friendly and pro-privatisation. At their spring conference in March the Lib-Dems passed policy to ban any strikes which “will cause far reaching damage to the economy and national interest”. Because the socialist movement has become so...
The murder of Robert McCartney has been “seized upon” by opponents of Sinn Fein/IRA in Belfast, London, Dublin and Washington, as a club with which to beat them into submission and force the IRA out of existence. The press, TV and politicians have “built up” the McCartney case into something it would not be without them — if it did not fit in with their political needs now. A number of articles in Solidarity have, in passing, noted this. If you doubt that opportunist use is being made of the McCartney case, consider the following case, which is only now, in the wake of the McCartney killing...
In his long and cloyingly hagiographical obituary-biography of Al Richardson in Revolutionary History (a journal devoted to the history of the revolutionary Marxist movement: vol 8, no. 4) John McIlroy* in passing revives an old dispute centred on an article I published in Workers’ Liberty 10 years ago. "... attacks [on Revolutionary History] were easily turned aside. When one tribal chieftain donned war paint and delivered himself of the rancorous assertion that the business of those around the journal ‘was prattle and word processing not practice’, one of his own braves** retorted: “It is a...
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