Solidarity 147, 12 March 2009

Three events that made the IRA: part 2

Click here for part 1 The Border had become the focus of nationalist feeling and anger. The North was now “Ireland unfree”. For the post “Fifth World Congress” Irish communists, the task was first to “complete the bourgeois revolution” before then proceeding to socialist concerns, and for the Communists as for the least enlightened Catholic nationalists that came to be identified with unifying the island. On that basis the Communists, manipulatively, merged themselves politically with republicans moving left. Abstract Republicanism, with its fetish of physical-force methods which to others...

Three events that made the IRA: part 3

Click here for part 2 Denying in theory the idea that the Irish-British were the problem, the Provisionals recognised it in bloody practice. The nonsensically inadequate explanation that the Protestant-Unionists were all traitors, collaborators, anti-nationalists came in time to amount to a “republican” version of the idea that there were two Irish nations, or peoples. The Protestants were a bad, non-legitimate, Irish nation; and so the Provisionals, in effect a private army whose war was backed by perhaps a third of the Six-Counties Catholics, could maim and kill as many of the one million...

Sri Lanka: thousands of Tamils face death

The Sri Lankan Army onslaught against the Tamils continues unabated with the indiscriminate shelling of civilians, including in the government declared safe zones. Human Rights Watch, in a report released on 20 February, estimated that 2,000 civilians had been killed and 5,000 injured since the rapid escalation of the war from the 10 December last year. The Tamil Tigers have been driven back to a small pocket of land around 50 square kilometres. Anyone attempting to flee risks being shot by the Tigers, who are holding out for an international intervention that would allow them to keep control...

Pakistan cricket massacre: Why police were “too busy”

Farooq Tariq, General Secretary of the Labour Party Pakistan, comments on the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team on 3 March. The religious fanatics have targeted sports such as soccer and cricket, terming these evil sports smuggled in from the West. “It is promoting Western cultural norms, it must not be allowed”, was the justification of the Taliban to ban these sports when it governed Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. The agenda of the “jihadi” terrorists is clearly not just to enforce what they consider to be an Islamic system, but to overrun and destabilise the state itself. Pakistanis...

Blacklisting: Fight trouble with troublemaking!

Even in periods of low levels of class struggle, bosses do not neglect their basic techniques for making sure their workforces are as compliant and trouble-free as possible. The history of blacklisting in Cold War-era America — where lists of suspected (Stalinist) communists, Trotskyists, trade union militants and other dissidents were compiled to keep troublemakers out of certain jobs — is well-known; it seems that its spirit is alive and well in modern-day Britain. A story that broke first in the Guardian exposed several construction industry giants, including Laing O’Rourke, Sir Robert...

New Labour: the new crony party

The conviction of David Mills, estranged husband of New Labour minister Tessa Jowell, for taking bribes is yet more evidence of the party’s growing links to the super-rich. Mills, a lawyer, advised the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on offshore tax avoidance schemes. His case came to prominence because it was claimed that he’d used a bribe received from Berlusconi to pay off the mortgage on a house he shared with Jowell. Last month Mills was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail for accepting a bribe of $600,000 in return for not revealing details of Berlusconi’s offshore...

Amnesty for migrants?

A debate over an amnesty or regularisation for so-called “illegal immigrants” has restarted with the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, pushing hard for the idea (in the BBC’s Panorama programme on 9 March for instance). Fortunately Johnson’s arguments for amnesty (which are not in line with Tory policy) may help the labour movement get clarity on this issue, as they expose what “amnesty” can mean in practice. Johnson wants amnesty to complement the drive against “illegal immigrants” (on which there is cross-party agreement). The current immigration crackdown was begun long before the economic...

War-refusers: the other Israel

Following massive demonstrations and a wave of student occupations against Israel’s war in Gaza, British activists have been hosting a speaker tour with Tamar Katz, one of the Shministim, Israeli high school students jailed for refusing to fight in the occupied Palestinian territories. The tour has included meetings in universities of up to 100 (at Nottingham University) and an International Women's Day meeting in London. She was interviewed for Solidarity by Sofia Lawrence. How did you come to make the decision to refuse to fight in the IDF? I was 16 when the second war in Lebanon began and...

Stop the Royal Mail sell-off!

The Postal Services Bill, under which the New Labour government plans to sell off 30% of Royal Mail, was brought to the House of Lords for its second reading on 10 March. The legislation should come to the House of Commons within the next two or three months. The Government seems intent on ramming through the privatisation by using Tory support for it to overwhelm a probably sizeable rebellion by Labour MPs. Although New Labour, like all other capitalist governments, has suddenly been convinced of the need for public ownership of banks in order to save the economic system from disaster, it is...

N. Ireland: IRA diehards attempt new offensive

Partition remains the root problem The killing of two soldiers and one policeman in Northern Ireland by the “Real IRA” and the “Continuity IRA”, both of which are splinters from the Adams-McGuinness republicans, sharply raises the level of challenge to the status quo by the fringe republican groups who have rejected the move into mainstream bourgeois politics which the Adams-McGuinness republicans took a decade ago. There have been many incidents involving these groups in recent years, but the three killings amount to a qualitative escalation. As we go to press on 11 March, peace rallies...

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