Solidarity 112, 18 May 2007

Hands off Heartsease High!

A hundred people attended Heartsease High School in Norwich to launch a campaign against proposals to turn the school into Norwich’s first City Academy. The meeting was chaired by local Labour MP Ian Gibson, who has come out firmly against the Academy. The Division Secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the region’s NUT Executive member were there, along with local teachers, parents (and some students), councillors and governors. Two members of the Anti-Academies Alliance spoke about the chaos caused by the switch from being a community school to becoming an Academy. The meeting...

Rail activists meet

Supporters of the rank and file railworkers’ bulletin Off The Rails (OTR) met in Birmingham on May 5th. Under the title “Making our unions fit to fight”, the meeting brought together activists from various disputes to share experiences and discuss how what we learned from each other could be used to make the unions more effective and membership led. First up was a report from the recent Metronet engineering workers’ victory on LUL. This highlighted the advantage for workers in having an elected strike committee that could organise propaganda, demand solidarity from other grades and counter...

UCU conference

UCU, the lecturers’ union, formed from the merger of Natfhe and AUT, meets in conference for the first time at the end of May. The SWP have a softish motion for a boycott of Israel on the agenda (through Brighton University and UEL). The motion includes the following stupidity, “Congress believes that in these circumstances [of Israeli occupation] passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic.” Such a statement – that no criticism of Israel is anti-semitic – is no casual, sloppy mistake. The last Natfhe conference, in 2006, passed a similar...

NUJ to vote on boycott

Several high profile and large NUJ branches — ITN, BBC London and Observer — have spearheaded a campaign for ballot over the NUJ’s recent decision to “call for a boycott of Israeli goods”. They believe, of course, that the policy will overturn the decision of the 2007 Annual Delegate Meeting. The sponsors of the ballot call are probably right. Whether a vote against the boycott in such a ballot will be for the right reasons is another matter. Many journalists who are vocal on the matter have been concerned about the way the policy will undermine the “impartiality” they need to do their job. On...

Pay ballot: vote yes!

By a CWU member POSTAL workers are balloting for strike action on a pay offer that can hardly even be called that. Under Royal Mail's “full and final” offer, there will be no increase in basic pay at all, just a lump sum of £250-550 per person — and that depending on £350 million in productivity “savings”. Bonuses for junk mail and election material will be scrapped. Harassment of those on sick will be stepped up. Meanwhile, seventy Post Offices are being transferred to WH Smith, threatening thousands of jobs. A strong yes vote is the first step in taking the offensive.

SNP win is no step forward

by Stan Crooke In the 3 May elections for the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish National Party (SNP) emerged as the largest party. It looks likely to form a minority administration. The SNP’s gains did not come from a collapse in the Labour vote, but mainly from the collapse of the votes for independent candidates and the candidates of the smaller parties. Or as Alf Young put it in the Glasgow Herald: “The far left took out its anger over New Labour, Blair, and Iraq, by backing a party which, while sharing their goal of Scottish independence, has even less interest than Gordon Brown in...

“As sure as the sun rises”?

The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), within which Scottish supporters of Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty are active, did very badly on 3 May. Its vote went down from 128,000 in 2003 to 12,731 this year, and it lost all its seats in the Scottish Parliament. The SSP Executive’s statement on this debacle is inadequate. It amounts to 64 paragraphs. 27 of those paragraphs concern Tommy Sheridan, the former SSP leader who split from the SSP last year to form his own personal vehicle, Solidarity-Scotland. Much, if not everything, that the statement has to say about Sheridan is true. But trying to pin...

Pointers for rebuilding the SSP

AGAINST AN SNP GOVERNMENT The SSP must be clear that the likely Scottish National Party (SNP) government, pro-capitalist and pro-independence, is no advance on a pro-capitalist and pro-Union Labour (or Labour/Lib-Dem) government. As the SSP has pointed out, "the SNPÅfs increasingly pro-business vision of an independent Scotland... promises hundreds of millions of pounds in corporate tax cuts to big business. This could only be achieved by plundering our public services". TURN TO THE WORKPLACES and TRADE UNIONS The SSP needs to make a turn to systematic workplace and trade union activity, and...

Campaign against stonings in Kurdistan

By Sofie Buckland A teenage girl belonging to the Yazidi religious sect has been stoned to death in northern Iraq. The killing was a punishment meted out for falling in love with a Muslim man, and has spiralled into further sectarian violence in the area. The 17-year-old girl, Du’a Khalil Aswad, returned to her town of Bashika in the northern province of Nineveh after converting to Islam in order to marry a Kurdish Sunni Muslim. She was met by a mob of 2,000, led by her family, and was stoned to death in the presence of police. Kurdish groups retaliated, shooting dead 23 workers travelling...

Defend migrant workers

By Amina Saddiq 3000 people demonstrated in central London for migrant workers’ rights on 7 April. This is much bigger than previous migrants’ rights demonstrations, and clearly a very positive step forward. However, there is a problem. The demonstration was called by the Strangers into Citizens campaign set up by the “community organisation” TELCO. TELCO has until now focussed mainly on living wage campaigning; migrant workers is a logical progression. However, like its living wage campaigns, Strangers into Citizens bears the marks of its highly problematic politics. The TELCO living wage...

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