Solidarity 148, 26 March 2009

Who boosted the Taliban?

The Taliban’s take-over of the scenic Swat valley in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province is a damning indictment of over six decades of military and “civilian” bourgeois rule in Pakistan. Pakistan’s “revolving door” of government, with military dictators and corrupt politicians taking turns at creaming off central resources and accumulating wealth, has left a vast proportion of the country mired in poverty, illiteracy and without access to basic amenities like sanitation, clean water and electricity. Where the state has abjectly failed, various shades of Islamist fundamentalists like the...

Middle-class parables

Review of The Age of Stupid This latest public-safety warning film on climate change was seen by thousands at 65 cinemas across the UK on Sunday 15 March, breaking a world record for the biggest simultaneous screening of a premiere. Viewers were all satellite-linked to the low-carbon centre stage at Leicester Square. This involved watching b-list stars and politicians, including Ken Livingstone and David Stern, being interviewed as they strolled down a second-hand green carpet surrounded by a gaggle of generic environmentalist-professionals and fixers. Speakers from local campaigns had been...

Jade Goody: Defying Anti-Working-Class Prejudice

On the day that I attended my first cervical smear test Jade Goody would have been a few months old. She was a little girl who, as she said in adulthood, missed out on a childhood. A little girl whose experience in life was going to be some way from my own. At 18 I had enjoyed a fairly happy childhood, growing up in a stable, working, working-class home, encouraged to attend and work hard at school in a way that my parents never had been a generation before. Unlike Goody’s, my parents were able to give me the support I needed to overcome practically and emotionally the subtle and manipulative...

A Stalinist betrayal? Aye Write!

A programme blurb for the recent Aye Write book festival in Glasgow advertises a “special session to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War”. The blurb goes on, “Scotland played a major role in the war with 500 volunteers. Daniel Gray (Homage to Caledonia) discusses the war with Chris Dolan, author of An Anarchist’s Story: the life of Ethel Macdonald, an embedded reporter from Motherwell known as ‘The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel’, and doyen of Spanish history and the war, Paul Preston, whose latest book, We Saw Spain Die, is the story of the journalists who reported the war...

A challenge to the tyranny of testing

If it wins the next election, New Labour proposes to reshape primary education. Pat Yarker reports on a challenge to the Government’s line of march. In January 2008 Ed Balls appointed Sir Jim Rose to review the current Primary curriculum and recommend changes for implementation from September 2011. Jim Rose, a distinguished professor of education, had already conducted a review of the teaching of reading (in 2006); that was seized on by education ministers to justify imposing on teachers, despite much opposition, a single method (phonics) to teach children to read. As we go to press his report...

Challenging Israeli militarism — and “absolute anti-Zionism”

For information about where Tamar spoke, see here . Between 5 and 13 March, I had the privilege of touring round the UK with Tamar Katz, a 19 year-old women from Tel Aviv who was jailed for three months at the end of last year for refusing to serve in the Israeli Defence Force as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians. During that time Tamar spoke thirteen times in nine cities — London, Brighton, Newcastle, Manchester, Bradford, Cambridge, , Sheffield and Edinburgh — I’d guess to a total of about 700 people. In addition to tNottinghamwo events sponsored by the rail union RMT and an...

Looking left

UAF; SWP and G20; Labour Party democracy call. UAF: bungling and popular frontism In Leeds on the 14 March around 50 attended Unite Against Fascism’s Yorkship regional conference. It was meant to be a discussion of the strategy for the Euro elections. What actually happened was 14 speeches from the platform by regional secretaries of major unions, the regional secretary of the Islamic Society, Labour MEP Linda McAvan, Sheffield University women’s offier Fiona Edwards (a member of the Stalinist sect Socialist Action), and five UAF full-timers including Weyman Bennett of the SWP. Being told six...

Feminist Fightback diary

Speak out and stand up for sex worker rights On Tuesday 31 March at 2pm at the Eros Fountain, Piccadilly Circus, workers in the sex industry and their allies are speaking out against the Policing and Crime Bill which will further criminalise sex workers. This speak out is called by x:talk, a sex worker-led project which provides free English classes for migrants in the sex industry. For more info go to www.xtalkproject.net . PICKET SUBWAY! Join a picket of Subway in London on 4 April in solidarity with Natalia Szymanska, a migrant worker employed by a Subway in Belfast, who was sacked on...

Solidarity with the Tamil people

Earlier this month a meeting in Chennai in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, sponsored by the United Socialist Party (sister party of the Socialist Party in the UK), launched an international Sri Lanka solidarity campaign. The early evening launch in the UK, on Saturday 21 March, was a low-key affair in a small room in Conway Hall run by a few members of the SP. A steering committee was agreed, based on the SP’s proposal whereby SP people are coordinator, treasurer and honorary President. Other people were allowed to nominate themselves and were accepted by the room, including five young second...

AWL gears up to face crisis

On Saturday 21 March 60 people, including many young workers and students, attended the Workers’ Liberty day school on “Capitalist Crisis, Workers’ Response” in London. In the school’s opening session a RMT comrade talked about London Underground's plan to slash jobs and the tube and about how militant trade unionists can leading a fight back against these kinds of cuts (see back page). Sean Matgamna outlined why he thought all those who see themselves in the tradition of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky will need to sharpen and intensify our socialist intervention into the political movements thrown...

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