Solidarity 150, 23 April 2009

NUT votes to boycott SATs

This year’s National Union of Teachers conference, held over the Easter weekend, voted unanimously to boycott SATs in the next academic year if the government fails to recognise the damage the tests are doing to our primary pupils. Conference called for the tests to be scrapped. The tests have little educational importance — they have been exposed as a form of government control. Published league tables are used as sticks to beat teachers with, and students are left with a barren curriculum that focuses heavily on numeracy and literacy rather than a wide spectrum of topics. Students are left...

MPs: on the take and on the make

Alice Mahon, the former Labour MP for Halifax, resigned on 17 April over government policy, in particular the Welfare Reform Bill. But her final decision to leave Labour was prompted Damian McBride affair. She had, she said, been “absolutely scandalised” by it. She is right to feel that way. However, and unfortunately, a startling fact about the McBride affair is that, so far, it has not had a negative impact on Labour’s standing in the polls. To many “smeargate” must be “same old, same old”, another reason to be cynical about all mainstream politics and all politicians. “Smeargate”, along...

The Tube: get ready!

London Underground staff voted by a huge majority to fight back over job cuts, pay and management bullying. For strikes, there were 3,165 Yes votes and just 619 No. For action short of strikes, 3,495 voted Yes and only 266 No. That was nearly 84% for strikes, and a whopping 93% for action short. But rather than accept this clear message of the workers strength of feeling, management went, typically, gone scurrying to their lawyers having discovered a trivial and irrelevant glitch in RMT's ballot notification. There was nothing wrong with the ballot itself, but a couple of errors in...

The Scottish TUC and boycotts against Israel: evidence collected, arguments evaded

“The delegation ended its visit with a strong sense of the injustice and human rights violations experienced on a daily basis by ordinary Palestinians,” states the recently published “Report of the Scottish TUC Delegation to Palestine and Israel, 28th February – 7th March 2009”. And it’s easy to see why the eleven trade unionists, a mixture of STUC officials and members of affiliated unions, felt such a strong sense of injustice by the end of their visit. In Jerusalem they met with victims of forced evictions and other discriminatory policies carried out by the Israeli authorities in the east...

The truth about slums

Now I recently made a resolution not to read any more depressing books. I'd read books about aid workers in Haiti, Bosnia, Cambodia, Somalia and Rwanda. And before that, I'd read Planet of Slums. Don't let that put you off. This book is a bit depressing because it speaks the truth. It does not pretend that the Western world is doing enough for slum-dwellers nor does it pretend that the problem will go away. On the contrary, it describes a terrifying picture that has haunted the minds of politicians for thousands of years. In Rome, the barbarians rebelled and ever since, governments have always...

Help raise money for our work for Vestas and other struggles

A year ago the Alliance for Workers' Liberty set itself an £18,000 fundraising target. This month, as our fund drive comes to an end, we have just about met it. However, we are always short of money - and never short of things to do! In the last couple of months, the AWL has played a crucial role initiating and then supporting the Vestas workers' struggle . We have been central to the mobilisation against the BNP's Red, White and Blue 'festival' . We have produced a fortnightly paper with unparalleled coverage of these struggles, as well as unparalleled theoretical material and debate about...

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