Solidarity 175, 10 June 2010

On WAGs and snobs

So the WAGs (Wives and Girlfriends) of England’s football team are to be banned by England coach Fabio Capello from attending the World Cup. Boozing, too much sex and the stress caused by competition over who had the biggest and most expensive handbag (and that’s just among the players) was the reason for failure in the last World Cup… apparently. Leave aside the heterocentric nature of the tag “WAGs” (so potential boyfriends would be allowed into the team camp if they are not acknowledged to be part of the usual entourage?); is there a sexist undercurrent to Capello’s ban? And do we care much...

Drive the bigots out of East London!

On 20 June the English Defence League plans to march through the Whitechapel area of the east London borough of Tower Hamlets. This is where the borough’s 30 percent Bengali/Muslim population is concentrated. We need to biggest possible mobilisation to stop the racists. Exactly how and on what basis to mobilise, however, is more complicated. The EDL say they will be marching against the UK Islamic Conference being held at the Troxy, an old East London venue in Limehouse. It’s not clear who exactly is behind the conference, but it will play host to notorious far-right Islamists such as Bilal...

How will education cuts affect women?

The next step for the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts is a newly formed and affiliated movement, “NCAFC Women’s Liberation”. After six successful months in action, women in the national campaign have taken the decision to pioneer this as a logical route to expansion. Women, who constitute 65 per cent of the public service workforce and tend to be the main recipients of the services, accordingly suffer more from education, public sector, welfare cuts. The liberation movement is set to tackle imminent threats to women who are studying and working in education. This will include a...

Pregnancy is not an illness!

Just after Christmas I had my third baby at home, in a birth pool with two midwives and my partner present. For such a major event it was uneventful — painful but intensely rewarding and an experience I remember with joy. I can say the same of my first two children. Some women I know had similar experiences of birth either in birth centres, hospital, or at home. But too many women I have met have found either one or all of their births hellish experiences, remembered with horror. What is it about the way maternity services operate that leave some women feeling as though they have been...

Anatomy of the Labour Party, 2010

Ed Maltby surveys some of the the Labour Party’s political factions and campaigns. CLPD The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy is the oldest group of the Labour left. It was founded in 1973 as part of a broader battle to force the Parliamentary Labour Party to obey the decisions of Annual Conference. In 1960-1961, rightwing PLP leader Hugh Gaitskell had led a successful fight to overturn the democratic decision of Conference calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament. The immediate trigger for the formation of the CLPD was Harold Wilson’s decision to exclude from the 1974 manifesto the Party...

Britain's austerity drive: fight the cuts!

On Monday 7 June, David Cameron declared war on British workers — the public sector workers who will lose jobs, the jobless who will lose benefits, the working-class people who will find the services they depend on are gone, or have been privatised out. Britain’s “way of life”, said Cameron, would be fundamentally disrupted, for years to come. Was Cameron just preparing expectations and talking up the scale of the cuts? No. One consultancy firm, Capital Economics, predicts as many as 750,000 jobs will go in the public sector. We are not, as Cameron put it, “all in this together”. Bosses who...

Ed Balls: UKIP candidate for Labour leader?

The recent disgraceful anti-immigration position taken by Labour leadership candidate Ed Balls is bad enough. Even more worrying is one union’s response to it. Writing in the Observer , Balls claimed that immigration from Eastern Europe has had a “direct impact on the wages, terms and conditions of too many people across our country — in communities ill-prepared to deal with the reality of globalisation, including the one I represent.” He effectively called for the abolition of the free movement of labour that exists across the EU. In the midst of the ongoing nationalist, anti-immigration orgy...

Build student-worker action

A number of socialists, including supporters of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, have recently been elected as full-time student union sabbatical officers. Ashok Kumar is a non-aligned leftist, NCAFC supporter, and Vice-President Education-elect at the London School of Economics Students’ Union. What’s your political background/previous involvement? I was born and raised in a Marxist household in Chicago, a city with a rich history of social and political resistance. I was the US equivalent of academic affairs sabbatical officer at the University of Wisconsin where we fought...

Jersey: "Workers unite to fight cuts"

That was the headline on the front page of the Jersey Evening Post after the new Jersey Council of Representatives, a cross-union committee, held a hustings for the vacant Senate seat in the States Assembly. The government has announced ten percent cuts over three years including: • Scrapping plans for anti-discrimination legislation • Scrapping subsidy for diabetic medication • Cutting back Special Educational Needs services • Stopping “non-essential” minor surgical procedures • Reducing physio services • Removing Christmas bonuses for those on pensions and benefits • Freezing accommodation...

My life at work: "the managers understand what a unionised workplace could mean for their bonuses"

Abdi-Nasser is a retail worker for a franchise in a large train station. Tell us about the work you do. I work for SSP, Select Service Partners, the catering multinational that runs franchises in thousands of stations from here to Sydney — in Britain, it runs the Burger Kings, Upper Crusts, the bars and pubs at every station and airport. It’s a minimum wage job, using mostly migrant labour. A lot of workers are here on student visas, with a limit of 20 hours on how long they can work, which means having more than one job under the counter. I know two Afghan workers who do 12 to 14 hour shifts...

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