Solidarity 075, 23 June 2005

Kate Ferguson Despite Sue Blackwell’s media notoriety, Hilary Rose is probably the most prominent spokesperson of the movement for an academic boycott of Israel. Her visit to a meeting organised by the Oxford branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in May therefore provided left activists in the city with a valuable opportunity to debate the issues surrounding the boycott intelligently. Unfortunately, it was a missed opportunity. Rose spoke after a passionate twenty-minute speech by a representativefrom the >Friends of Birzeit University , an organisation which campaigns against the...

The 1950s movie The Wild One is about a motorcycle “rebel” gang, led by Marlon Brando, invading a small American town and frightening the natives. Someone asks the Brando character: “And what are you rebelling against?” Famously, he replies: “What’ve you got?” The film was, for decades, banned in Britain. That may have been to protect impressionable British Marxists, especially the SWP, from mistaking the Brando character’s philosophy — whatever it is, I’m against it — for a serviceable political programme. It is now the core and only approach of the SWP. Look at Chris Harman’s review of the...

Click here for the series on The Roots of Bolshevism of which this article is part Lenin’s 1902 book, What Is To Be Done, is one of the most important of all the great texts of revolutionary Marxism. Its importance is especially great in the period we are now going through, when as a result of Stalinism and the defeats of the labour movement which it inflicted or precipitated, everywhere Marxism has come to be separated from the working class and its movement. The great task we face is once more to combine Marxism with the working class movements. What Is To Be Done was a polemical barrage...

Officials from the civil service union PCS are meeting new Work and Pensions minister David Blunkett on Thursday 23 June to ask for guarantees of no compulsory redundancies and no compulsory transfers in the DWP as the Government proceeds with its plans for over 100,000 job cuts in the civil service and 30,000 in the DWP. If the union does not get the guarantees then, so the officials say, it may go for a national ballot for national strike action in the autumn. The union’s DWP London Regional Committee had already called for a campaign of strike action in London, against job cuts as well as...

By a civil servant The largest civil service union, PCS, meeting in conference in Brighton on 8-10 June, voted to endorse the union Executive’s decision to call off its planned one day strike over jobs, pay and pensions on 23 March. It must be the first time Marxists have ever submitted a motion effectively congratulating themselves for calling off a strike without a single material gain for members. (The majority of the PCS Exec are Socialist Party, Scottish Socialist Party, and SWP.) Admitting that PCS’s 23 March strike call was about jobs and pay as well as pensions — despite what the PCS...

The Jubilee Debt Campaign (JDC) estimates that the total external debt of low-income countries is $523 billion (£260 billion). Debt is a huge problem. The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative is the current international debt relief scheme. HIPC was set up in 1996 by the World Bank and the IMF to reduce poor countries’ debts. It was reformed in 1999. The JDC says that by the beginning of 2005, only $49 billion (£25 billion) of debt has been cancelled. The total debt service being paid every day by low-income countries is $100 million (£50 million) and for every $1 (50p) received...

Some schools in Coventry have been closed and many parts of the education service have been affected by three days of strike action held by local UNISON and T&G members. They are striking against the imposition by the council of a “single status” pay deal from 1 June. The “single status” agreement, made nationally back in 1997, is supposed to produce a deal in every council to pay all workers on comparable jobs the same rates and thus avoid legal actions for equal pay. However, the Government has allocated no money for levelling up, so the deals often mean robbing Peter to pay Paula. Under the...

Lorry driver trade unionists from across Europe, who held a conference in Eastbourne on 6 May, had a steering group meeting in Malmö, Sweden, in early June. Suggestions for organisation included a drive for common Europe-wide criteria for safe and adequate rest facilities; common guidelines for securing a sectoral guaranteed minimum wage, by collective agreement or by law; and a demand for better cross border cooperation on control and enforcement of social legislation and labour market legislation. www.one888truckdrivers.org.uk/newsblog.html

By a delegate Delegates at the national conference of the public services union Unison, meeting in Glasgow from 21 June, have defeated the platform in two votes which show growing distrust of the Blair-Brown government. A motion welcoming the “Warwick Agreement” was defeated. That is the agreement under which, in July 2004, the union leaders agreed to rally behind Blair for the run-up to the General Election, shelving their members’ demands on issues like privatisation and repeal of anti-union laws, in return for a few slight concessions, some of which the Government would have had to give...

By Sacha Ismail and Houzan Mahmoud On the evening of Tuesday 21 June, the Government’s proposals to outlaw “incitement to religious hatred” passed the House of Commons with a majority of 57. The measure was abandoned before the last election due to obstruction in the House of Lords, and there were widespread predictions that this time enough Labour MPs would rebel to overturn the Government’s newly narrowed majority. In the event the backbench Labour rebellion was almost non-existent — John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn were the honourable exceptions. Outlawing incitement to hatred on the basis...