Solidarity 078, 11 August 2005

Solidarity with Iraqi unions

By a PCS member Following a motion passed at my central civil service union branch’s Annual General Meeting (AGM), about raising funds for the TUC Iraq Appeal, a sub-committee of our Executive Committee (BEC) was set up. It discussed a number of fund raising ideas including karaoke, showing a film about the trade union movement in Iraq and a quiz night but finally we settled on the idea of a second hand book stall including a weigh the cake competition and a cake making competition. Once we decided on the event we booked a room close to the staff canteen, put an appeal out to branch members to...

Strikers thwart bosses

Ansa Logistics, a firm which delivers Ford cars to showrooms, has been hit by a strike by 350 staff over pay and reduncancies. The company, which delivers 300,000 cars a year, was fortunately thwarted in its contingency plan to get cars to showrooms, due to the “disappearance” of their keys. 2000 cars which the bosses had planned to deliver instead remained in the safety of depots in Avonmouth and Liverpool. While the Avonmouth keys were eventually “found”, those missing from Liverpool are still at large. Ansa’s website claims that the reason that the T&G so unwilling to accept redundancies is...

A study in megalomania

Alan Porter reviews The Last Mitterrand Francois Mitterand simultaneously thought of himself as the saviour of the French left and the “last great president in the line of De Gaulle”. While Robert Guédiguian’s film is very good on this enormous egotism, as well as the 1981-95 president’s role in the Vichy regime’s mass deportation of Jews, its criticism of Mitterand’s failure to deliver the “break with capitalism” promised at the 1971 Socialist Party Congress is somewhat less sharp. The plot revolves around the young Antoine Moreau (based on a real writer, Georges-Marc Benamou) compiling a...

TV El Presidente

Almost every day in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez interrupts programming on the nation’s TV networks to deliver speeches and to propagandise for his government — the stations have no choice but to transmit his broadcasts, which last up to three hours. However, such tyrannical (and boring) media control is not enough for the self-proclaimed “socialist” president. At the end of July, a new South American news network, Telesur, was launched as an “initiative against cultural imperialism”. Chavez’s claim that Telesur is independent is highly dubious. Not only does the Venezuelan government own 51% of the...

The fall of the Commune

In 1894 Ernest Belfort Bax, one of the pioneer British Marxists, wrote a long series of articles on the Commune in Justice, the paper of the first British Marxist group, the Social Democratic Federation. We have abridged and adapted Bax’s narrative account of the Commune and also incorporated a few pages from a mid-1880s Socialist League pamphlet, written by Bax and William Morris. Sunday 21 May, was one of those glorious spring days in which the avenues of the Champs Elysées and the Tuilleries Gardens show up in the clear air a splendour of young foliage, to which hardly another capital in...

Okay to be big

Laura Schwartz reviews "Victoria’s Big Fat Documentary", 21 July, BBC 1 New Labour, Heat magazine and Weightwatchers are all united in their enthusiastic support for losing weight. As a result, the quest for thinness has acquired an almost moral quality. Conversely, being over-weight is equated with greed, laziness and stupidity — with being a bad person. Victoria Wood’s Big Fat Documentary showed how this obsession with food, eating and dress-size has permeated our national and individual psyches. Through interviews with celebrities, executives of dieting companies and the dieters themselves...

A festival of solidarity

By Pauline Bradley, Iraq Union Solidarity convenor The Tolpuddle martyrs festival is one of my favourite events in the union calendar. Held in the pretty Dorset village where in 1834, six poor, starving farm labourers held meetings and swore an oath to form a “friendly society” under a sycamore tree — it was one of the first trade unions formed. For the “crime” of signing “an illegal oath” the men were sentenced to hard labour and transportation to Australia. When news of their draconian sentence reached towns and cities, people were outraged. It sparked off the formation of other trade unions...

Iranian state murders gay teenagers

By Robin Sivapalan Two gay teenagers have been publicly executed in Iran adding two more to an estimated death toll of 4,000 lesbian, gay and bisexual people condemned to death by the regime since the Ayatollahs seized power in 1979. The two boys, Mahmoud Asgari (16) and Ayaz Marhoni (18), were imprisoned for 14 months and subjected to 228 lashes before being executed in Edalat (“Justice”) Square in north east Iran on July 19. Since the original report by the Iranian Students News Agency detailing the charge of sodomy, a story by Iran Focus alleges that the boys were instead charged with...

After IRA “dump arms”, what next?

By John O’Mahony The IRA’s Army Council has formally declared the organisation’s military campaign at an end, as from 4pm on 28 July 2005: “The leadership of Oglaigh Na hEireann (the soldiers, or army, of Ireland) has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign… All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms. “All volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and political programmes through exclusively peaceful means. “Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.” “They will “engage with the Independent International Commission on...

Defend civil liberties

“Why the fuck can’t we rewrite human rights legislation?” Tony Blair shouted in exasperation to his officials and minions at a meeting shortly after the 7 July London terror attack. According to the Observer he was, as early as this, contemplating the introduction of more repressive legislation to deal with terrorism. Blair is a man who has forgotten every principle of bourgeois liberal and democratic justice trainee lawyers learn in law school. But then the hallmark of the New Labour clique has been a willingness to abandon all principles and any principles in order to win power, stay in...

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