Solidarity 075, 23 June 2005

By Pat Yarker Before the General Election Channel 5 screened Classroom Chaos, a video-diary-cum-documentary produced by Roger Graef. Graef pioneered so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries for television. He has a track-record as a maker of programmes which go behind the scenes, take important issues seriously, stimulate and inform public debate and sometimes help bring about significant reforms. Over twenty years ago, his series about the police in action led to big improvements in the way they treat rape-survivors. The idea for “Classroom Chaos” involved a teacher signing up with a “supply”...

Sacha Ismail spoke to Briggs Bomba, an activist in the Zimbabwean democracy movement and international coordinator of the Zimbabwe International Socialist Organisation (ISO). What’s the current situation in Zimbabwe? We are in the middle of a severe economic crisis, following the reintroduction of the government’s neoliberal “Economic Structural Adjustment Programme” (ESAP). ESAP began in 1991, but Mugabe retreated in the late 90s when workers, the urban poor, peasants and war veterans rose up against the effects of structural adjustment. The ZANU-PF regime redirected this anger into limited...

By Patrick Murphy (secretary, Leeds NUT) Four school staff trade unions struck in Leeds on Tuesday 21 June against compulsory redundancies. There were large and noisy pickets on all three sites of the Specialist Inclusive Learning Centre, with passing motorists constantly honking horns to show their support. Parents turned up to the pickets, some with their children. The roads outside all three sites were festooned with home-made placards supporting our demands for proper funding and no job cuts. In February the Leeds North West Specialist Inclusive Learning Centre (SILC) announced that they...

By Cathy Nugent In November 1995 Ken Saro-Wiwa, the best known leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, was executed by the Nigerian government. The Ogoni are an ethnic minority of 500,000 who live in about 350 square miles in the impoverished Niger river delta region of Nigeria. Saro-Wiwa, a novelist and TV producer, was killed, along with eight other Ogoni activists, because they seriously challenged Nigeria’s status quo — they wanted to stop the oil companies, in collusion with the government, destroying the environment and lives of the Niger delta people. Over forty...

By Liam Conway In 1976 James Callaghan made a famous speech attacking schools for their failure to deliver a workforce suited to the needs of the economy. Callaghan was talking nonsense of course — schools had nothing to do with the failure of British capitalism to meet the crisis generated by the massive oil price hike of the early 70s. Still teachers and schools proved a useful scapegoat, along with lazy workers and militant trade unions. But the Callaghan speech was a starting point for successive government drives to vocationalise the curriculum in response to business demands. In many...

Maybe for the first time ever, a trade union has tried to block its members’ access to a website, in a move similar to the Chinese government’s restrictions on Internet access. The Executive Committee of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has decided to try to shut down the “uk-fire” website, which, in its former guise of “30k” was a key part of holding together the rank and file of the FBU during the pay dispute. Since then, the uk-fire website has been an open discussion forum for firefighters, both FBU members and others. Now the FBU Executive is claiming that the discussion forum is contrary to...