Solidarity 167, 18 February 2010

The Aylesbury Estate at Elephant and Castle is at the heart of the Camberwell and Peckham constituency. Built in the 1960s and 70s, the estate is currently home to 7,500 people, but is due to be demolished in stages. The council plan a privately-funded regeneration scheme. The tenants are concerned that vast amounts of money will be made by private companies, as council housing with secure tenancies is replaced with various types of private housing. Inevitably the poorest and most vulnerable will lose out as council housing stock is reduced in a borough which already has 15,000 on its waiting...

AWL member Jill Mountford is standing in the Camberwell and Peckham constituency whose sitting MP is the prominent Labour MP Harriet Harman. Over the last few weeks AWL members and our supporters have leafleted most of the constituency, and are building for our second meeting on a local estate. Members have been working hard, discussing with residents and workers. Femi, a journalist from Nigeria, met us in Peckham Rye and commented that Labour had managed to hand out billions to the bankers but could not fix the pot-holes in the road [we were standing next to huge craters], or clear up the...

How should the working-class left respond to the general election and the cuts that will inevitably follow, whichever party wins? Solidarity spoke to a range of activists (all in a personal capacity) from across the left. We will continue the discussion in future issues. We need to lift our gaze up from the mire of party politics Andy Littlechild is Chair, RMT London Underground Engineering branch and a member of the Solidarity Federation. My views about the particular details and outcomes of this general election are probably much the same as those of most people on the left. However, views...

Around a dozen activists, mostly members of the AWL, made their presence felt opposite the Israeli embassy on 28 January in a picket called to show solidarity with Emelia Marcovich, the latest Israeli student refuser to be sent to jail. Emelia is a member of the Shministim, a network of Israeli high-school students and sixth-formers who face jail rather than take part in compulsory national service in the Israeli Defence Force. Emelia is also active in solidarity campaigning between Israelis and Palestinians, working on campaigns against house demolition and the so-called separation “fence”...

Anti-capitalist activists and comedy fans (and a few people who fell into both categories) packed out London's Cross Kings pub on February 10 for a music and comedy benefit to raise money for Batay Ouvriye, the radical Haitian workers’ federation with a proud history of organising amongst Haiti’s hyper-exploited workers and urban poor. We were responding to an appeal for international solidarity in the wake of the devastating earthquake. High-profile comedians such as Jeremy Hardy, Robin Ince and Shappi Khorsandi appeared on the bill, alongside folk-rock singer Robyn Hitchcock. The comedy, as...

Vicki Morris spoke to Eran Cohen from London Coalition Against Poverty about the ideas behind their network. VM: What is “direct action casework” and what are its advantages/disadvantages over broader political campaigns around poverty? EC: Direct action casework is a combination of social-work type legal casework mixed with direct action. The practice is fairly old (there’s many examples from the USA in the 1930s) and the idea is simple when operated in a welfare state: someone who is refused the housing/benefits they’re entitled to through intimidation or a dodgy legal basis (what we call...

What links the notorious war criminal Henry Kissinger, the right-wing anti-semite Michal Kaminski and Lord Michael Ashcroft, a billionaire who made his fortune by hijacking the Belizean economy? No, this isn’t the plot of some tawdry action thriller. Neither is it the opening salvo of a convoluted conspiracy theory. Occam’s principle that “entities must not be multiplied without necessity” suggests the existence of a simple answer. So what is it? What links these three egregious personalities and a teeming cesspool of others? Why, David Cameron’s “cuddly” Conservative Party. Cameron would have...

Edward Maltby spoke to Marco Tranchino, organiser of the 14 February London demonstration “No Vatican — London for a Secular Europe” EM: Why did you organise the march? What are your demands? MT: This demonstration is organised by “Facciamo Breccia” (a coalition of Italian secularist associations) every year the no VAT (i.e. not Vatican) demonstration sees thousands of Italians marching in Rome to protest against the power of the Vatican and its undemocratic interference in Italian politics. However, the Vatican's influence is such that the mainstream media hardly report this event. It’s...

On Sunday 14 February three hundred people marched on the Italian embassy in London to protest against Pope Benedict XVI’s proposed September visit to the UK, a visit which will be costing the British taxpayer an estimated £20 million. “No Vatican — London for a Secular Europe”, was organised in solidarity with Facciamo Breccia, a coalition of Italian secularist organisations who, on the anniversary of the creation of the Vatican on 11th February 1929, mobilise thousands of Italians onto the streets of Rome to protest against the Vatican’s influence in Italian politics. “The secular movement...

On 8 February, over 100 students at Sussex University marched up to the top floor of the university’s prestigious Bramber House conference centre and staged a “‘flash occupation”. They marched out 30 hours later, promising more actions to come in the future. The occupation was part of the Defend Sussex Campaign, a fight by students and staff at Sussex against huge cuts that the university is planning. Our Defend Sussex blog outlines the scale of the threat: “The university is planning to cut £3 million this academic year, and £5 million next year. The costs of these cuts will be passed on to...