Solidarity 096, 13 July 2006

By Sacha Ismail In a speech to the City of London on 20 June, Gordon Brown committed himself to “retaining an independent nuclear deterrent”. A Brown government, in other words, would spend tens of billions of pounds on a weapons system whose use would necessarily mean tens of thousands of deaths and which exists for no reason other than to bolster British imperialism’s prestige and power to terrorise. The commitment to replace Trident exposes the real motivations of those who claim to be for “multilateral” disarmament, but are in fact committed to maintaining Britain’s nuclear arsenal at all...

By Reshma Stephens THE government’s review of energy policy, whose recommendations were announced on 11 July, will undoubtedly provoke widespread hostility on the left - but perhaps for the wrong reasons. The media have focused on the boost given to nuclear power, with the review stating “Government believes that nuclear has a role to play in the future UK generating mix alongside other low-carbon options” and concluding that, under “likely scenarios”, the government should commission new nuclear power stations to replace existing reactors. This has already led to articles in Socialist Worker...

BY David Broder On July 1st activists working to solidarise with the Iraqi labour movement held a conference in London to discuss the prospects of workers in Iraq and what can be done over here to help the struggle against the US/UK occupation and political Islam. The conference brought together members of the Worker-communist Party of Iraq, Iraq Union Solidarity, Solidarité Irak, Pagine Marxiste, the Alliance for Workers' Liberty and the Worker-communist Party of Iran (Hekmatist). It got messages of support from US Labor Against the War, the Australian group AusIraq and socialists in Poland...

BY SOFIE BUCKLAND, NUS NEC (PERSONAL CAPACITY) At this year's NUS conference, despite the left's invocation of the militant student struggles in France, the right-wing of the union succeeded in overturning NUS's policy on education funding and introduced a policy in favour of means-tested grants. In contrast to the British student movement's failure to understand the lessons of the anti-CPE struggle, Greek students spent May and June fighting against the privatisation of their education. When the Greek student assembly declared "we're going to do what they did in France", they meant it. This...

BY Vicki Morris FRESH from his PR appearance on the BBC, President Vladimir Putin of Russia is preparing to host the leaders of the new free world at the G8 summit at St Petersburg (15-17 July). A counter-summit and the second Russian Social Forum have been organised, but, as was feared, they are meeting with sinister repression. A report from French journalist Carine Clément was sent to the email lists of the European Social Forum. Here is a translated extract: For several weeks now the secret services and the police have been taking a close look at Russian militants linked to...

BY Paul Hampton THE Mexican elections on 2 July were fixed in favour of the conservative candidate, according to a host of reports by observers. Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) has declared himself the winner with 35.88%. But the main challenger, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the liberal nationalist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), given 35.31%, has said a fraud has been committed. The old ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) came a distant third. The whole thing looks like a repeat of the 1988 election, when Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the PRD...

BY ALAN PORTER Evo Morales' MAS party has won 51% of seats in elections for a new Constituent Assembly, leaving him well short of the two thirds majority needed to pass legislation. This is problematic for his government, since the whole point of a Constituent Assembly is to rewrite the constitution. Now the support of right-wing parties will be needed for any reform to be made. Some Western media has rather unfairly labelled this as a “defeat” for Morales’ “radical reforms” - after all, he did as well as in December's presidential election, and leading right-wing opposition PODEMOS lost 5% -...

Indonesia Trade union rights may be curbed in new special economic zones (SEZs) in Indonesia’s Riau Islands, according to press reports. The plans include restricting the right to organise in the SEZs and allowing firms to sack workers without having to pay compensation. Under existing labour legislation, workers have the right to freely set up one or more trade unions in their workplaces. Indonesia has plans for more SEZs. It recently signed an agreement with Singapore to transform Batam, Bintan and Karimun into SEZs, because Singapore is running out of space for manufacturing. The Indonesian...

I WAS glad to see Solidarity celebrating the 150th anniversary of Freud’s birth in Thomas Carolan’s article (3/93) and Lynne Moffat’s rejoinder (3/95), though I feel there are problems with both their positions. Freud was an extraordinarily innovative thinker who constructed a materialist psychology unfettered by Victorian moralism on sexuality. He provided a language to talk about psychological processes freed from religious dogma. Although I believe he missed the theoretical significance of it, he valued the ‘simplest’ of human processes, namely listening to the other and trying to make...

THE last issue of Solidarity contained a brief report on the amnesty suggested by the government for those in the UK without proper documentation. The report was uncritical of the suggestion and implied that it was a progressive move. However amnesties imposed by the state are not an amelioration of immigration controls. When supported by those critical of restrictions they are not a form of resistance to controls. Rather they are an integral part of controls. They are integral to controls because they are based not on the needs of the undocumented but on the requirements of British capital –...