Solidarity 216, 14 September 2011

By Dale Street Around 80 supporters of the Scottish Defence League (SDL), including a number of English Defence League (EDL) supporters imported for the event, staged a static protest in Edinburgh last Saturday (10th September). Politically, the SDL represents the same lumpen anti-Muslim racist bigotry, leavened by the presence of a number of outright fascists in its ranks, as its English counterpart. Organisationally, the SDL has always been a much weaker force than the EDL – it has never been able to stage a demonstration (as opposed to a static protest), and it has never been able to exceed...

By Hugh Edwards That was the defiant declaration of one banner as over a million workers struck on Tuesday 6 September against the latest and most draconian budget of Italy's coalition regime of Silvio Berlusconi. In a hundred cities and towns workers' responded to the strike called by the main confederation union CGIL. Large parts of industry, transport and public services closed down. Tens of thousands marched and rallied in the country's public squares. The overwhelming feeling of those on the streets was "enough is enough"; the conditions of life have plummeted to new lows of hardship and...

Lucinda Lavelle from the British Libyan Solidarity Campaign spoke to Sacha Ismail and Chris Marks. There are a lot of Libyan exiles in the UK; Manchester is the biggest centre, with more than 10,000 people. But in general activists have tended to write and do things individually, in isolation from one another, with no attempt to build collective campaigns. The reason is that no one trusted anyone; and there was an element of sense to this, because the community was infiltrated by Qaddafi’s agents. Before the start of the movement in North Africa this year, there were two issues that really...