Solidarity 150, 23 April 2009

How Derek Draper cut his teeth

Long before “Smeargate” — the plan cooked up between Gordon Brown aide Damian McBride and New Labour wonk, turned psychotherapist, turned blogger, Derek Draper to muck-rake against top Tories — hit the headlines, Draper was involved in similar-style campaigns. Back in the late 80s he used his talent for spinning, smearing and when all else failed plain lying... against the left. Top of his hit list back in 1988 was ourselves. Draper was then at Manchester University and a Labour Student über-hack. (This writer recalls being sprayed with spittle as Draper earnestly defended witch-hunting...

Syria: a prison for its people

A Syrian joke goes like this. Two Syrian mukhabarat officers are competing in the Secret Police Olympics. The spooks are supposed to go into a wood and catch a rabbit using nothing but their bare hands. The other countries’ teams have caught their rabbits, but the Syrians have not returned. The judges go into the wood and find the two secret policemen beating a donkey. They are shouting, “Confess you are a rabbit! Confess you are a rabbit!” Chronology 1920-46: France administered Syria 1948: Syria defeated in war with Israel 1958-61: Syria unites with Egypt to form the United Arab Republic...

Kabul’s first women’s protest since the 1970s

On 15 April 1,200 women took to the streets of Kabul in protest against President Karzai's Shia Family Law, which severely limits women’s rights and legalises marital rape. For the most part, the demonstrators were young women, many of them students, who consider the new legislation backslides in the direction of the kind of anti-women legislation employed by the Taliban. Karzai’s administration have so far refused to make the precise wording of the new laws public. However, it is known that the law’s Article 132 requires wives to submit to their husbands’ sexual demands, and that, furthermore...

Brutal crisis, brutal police

In the coming months all of us, demonstrations, strikers, anti-capitalist activists need to discuss what we can do to push back the power of the police. We need demands which “deal” with the reality of police brutality... It’s two o’clock in the morning. Over one hundred political activists, congregated in a small community centre, have laid their plans, made preparations and are attempting to get some rest for the day ahead. But things don’t go as expected. The police have arrived, local roads are blocked, neighbours woken and more than eighty arrested. They have no weapons, intend no harm to...

What we do: a week in the life of the AWL

As Solidarity goes to press on 22 April, AWL members across London are going to Tube picket lines on the Victoria Line, and stations and depots on other lines, to distribute the Workers’ Liberty bulletin Tubeworker. Victoria Line drivers are striking for one day over safety and management bullying, and workers across the Tube are about to re-ballot on a cross-network dispute over pay and jobs. It’s the biggest move so far by a large, well-organised group of workers in Britain to push back the bosses’ drive to make workers pay for the capitalist crisis. Tubeworker is not just an occasional...

Roma in Italy: "We are not maggots"

“Rome and Italy today are responsible for a racial segregation unique in the west” (La Republica). On 30 March the Guardian carried an editorial “Italy Fascism’s Shadow”, commenting on the merger of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia with Gianfranco Fini's ex-neo-fascist Alleanza Nationale party, pointing out how, alone of the former axis powers, post-war Italy had never completely confronted its fascist past and concluding that despite the efforts of Fini to distance it from that legacy it remained tainted by that tradition. But it takes a remarkable dose of liberal naivity — or cynicism? — to...

Iraq: new threats of sectarian war

A new spate of suicide bombings in Iraq could signal a new descent into sectarian civil war. The suicide bombings followed clashes between Iraqi government troops — aided by US forces — and groups from the Awakening Councils (Sahwa), a Sunni-Arab movement. By assiduous negotiation, the US split the Sahwa groups away from Al Qaeda in late 2006, and brought them onto the US payroll. Evidently the Sahwa leaders decided that there was no hope of restoring full Sunni hegemony in Iraq, and their best hope was to lean on the USA to lean on the Shia-Kurdish coalition government for concessions. In...

RMT calls protest to support Arab workers on Israeli railways

The RMT rail union has called a protest outside the Israeli embassy in London on 11 May to support Arab workers threatened with the sack from Israeli railways. More details here . Also in this posting: Iraqi teachers' union under threat; Israeli Antiquities Authority workers fight sack. ISRAEL : Sawt el-Amel, an NGO based in Nazareth, are have launched an appeal against the decision by Israel Railways to deny employment to railroad crossing guards who lack a permit to carry weapons. As such permits are usually only issued to army veterans, 150 Arab employees now face the sack. From the appeal...

Visteon: fighting for a better deal

“We were made redundant without any notice, we weren’t offered any redundancy pay, we were going to lose our pensions, and then they were going to make us into criminals for objecting to it!” “The real people are the people that pay their taxes and try their best to keep within the law. But the law has failed us, and this is the reason why we have to take the action we have taken. The law does not recognise us. You can see the amount of support going on there. People are fed up of the status quo and we need change and we need it now. “It’s not acceptable what’s happening, what they are doing...

Short industrial reports

Glasgow school closures; Unison health conference; Trinity Mirror journalists' dispute; London Overground workers win 22% pay rise. GLASGOW SCHOOLS : On 23 April a meeting of Glasgow City Council will vote on whether to go ahead with a sweeping programme of closures of primary schools and nurseries throughout the city. The original proposals envisaged the closure of 13 primary schools and 11 nurseries, attended by some 2,000 children. The Council, especially the Labour Group, have been on the defensive ever since. This is because their arguments in favour of closure do not stack up. One...

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