Solidarity 151, 14 May 2009

Anti-BNP campaign offers working-class politics

On Sunday 10 May around twenty anti-fascists from the Nottingham Stop the BNP campaign distributed 3,500 leaflets in Bulwell, north of the city centre. This area, which in the 1980s elected a Communist Party councillor, has been targeted by the fascist British National Party (BNP) for several months. For the first time in a generation, the fascists have been going door-to-door in inner city Nottingham. Bulwell has some of the lowest educational achievement figures in the country, the lowest numbers moving onto higher education, poor housing and widespread poverty. Bulwell has been at the...

“Anyone but BNP” is not enough

The victory of at least one BNP MEP in the upcoming Euro-elections now looks almost inevitable. To accept this is not to collapse into nihilism or to admit defeat, but to indict the New Labour, Tory and Lib Dem councillors and MPs across the country. Their policies of cuts and privatisation have created the conditions in which the BNP — posing as a populist alternative to the establishment — have been allowed to grow. A Euro-MP would give the BNP access to enormous financial resources, allowing them to develop and galvanise their organisation. As anyone who lives in an area of BNP strength...

Every act of solidarity counts

Fighting migration controls is grinding, a daily and often terrible battle, mostly fought by individuals and small groups of people. Often it is inspiring. But there is a lot going on. On Thursday 7 May Ayodeji Omotade was acquitted by Brent Magistrates Court of threatening and abusive behaviour. That is of shaming British Airways and exposing the reality. In March 2008, Campaign Against Immigrant Controls activists leafleted a BA flight on which Biafran Independence activist Augustine was being deported. We asked people to speak up, to show solidarity. Ayodeji did, in response to screaming...

Hope and its discontents

Review of Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge (New York Review of Books, 2008) Richard Greeman’s translation of Serge’s final novel is yet another blow struck against Stalinist despotism and for the recovery of an authentic socialist tradition from the ‘midnight in the century’ of totalitarianism. This project is part of what Vasily Grossman called the ‘radiant dossier’ that would emerge from the debris of NKVD archives that one day would be opened. Its so fitting that the experience of working-class defeat documented in Serge’s novel comes to us in this historical moment when the vestiges of...

A story of imperialists

Rosalind Robson reviews Radio 4’s dramatisation of J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (Sundays 3pm) I very much enjoy historical novels but JG Farrell’s Booker Prize winning book (part of a trilogy about the British Empire) had until now, escaped my notice. This story, one episode in, was so cracking I went straight to Amazon to get my copy. Set in a fictional garrison town, events are loosely based on the 1857 rebellion against the British East India Company by sepoys (Indian soldiers). In the first episode the rebellion begins and the British residents come under siege. The story will be...

Pakistan: “Unite those opposing both Taliban and military”

The Swat situation is complicated. Both sides, the religious fanatics and the government are trying different tactics and are not sure which one will work. The prices for their blunders is paid by ordinary people of the area. The Taliban settled in Swat long ago and were integrated in the area. Between 1994-95, there was a religious movement of Tehreek-e Nafaz-e Shariat-e-Mohammdi (TNSM), led by Maulana Sufi Mohammed for the implementation of “Islam”. But the government and the Sufi Mohammed compromised. When the US attacked Afghanistan over 15,000 fundamentalists and followers of Sufi...

Workers’ action continues

According to US Labor Against the War, the revival of Iraq’s labour movement first marked by the protests on government workers’ pay in August 2008 is continuing. Basra’s oil pipeline workers, who had been staging occupations of the facilities since April 27 to demand back pay, scored a victory in early May as the Baghdad administration agreed to meet with their leaders and negotiate a payment schedule. The administration capitulated after the workers threatened to shut down the pipeline and call a general strike. Union leader Faisal Hamdan told management the workers were prepared to...

Obama signals drive for a deal

So long as the Jewish and Arab workers in the Middle East remain subordinate to the forces of Israeli and Arab (or Islamic) chauvinism — as they are now — the only hope for Palestinian progress towards their own state is from intervention on their behalf from outside governments. Of those, the USA is the decisive one. The US government has the power to force Israel out of the West Bank and to insist that Israel accept the creation of an independent Palestinian state — of the Palestinian state stipulated in the November 1947 UN resolution that authorised the setting-up of Israel. (That state...

London Met workers and students fight back

Thursday 7 April saw the beginning of a fight back by workers and students in Higher Education. UCU members at London Metropolitan University staged a walkout, and the Universities UK conference on privatisation of higher education was disrupted by free education activists. London Met is threatening to cut 550 full-time equivalent positions, potentially affecting over 800 staff — a quarter of the workforce. This comes after gross mismanagement by the college’s Vice-Chancellor, Brian Roper, who fiddled the books, making up paper students in order to secure extra £56 million funding over several...

Education Not for Sale action shuts down university bosses’ conference

On 7 May, ENS and other free education activists shut down a conference organised by Universities UK, the government’s Higher Education Funding Council and the “Association for University Research and Industry Links” — a conference held to discuss how to best hand over our higher education system to profit-making businesses. The protest was planned at the 18 April student conference which grew out of the university Gaza occupations. About thirty activists demonstrated outside the Westminster conference centre where the event was held. The centrepiece, though, was the dozen of us who dressed up...

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