Solidarity 228, 15 December 2011

Life on Labour?

By Dave Osler Despite the failure of Russia’s latest space probe, scientists are rightly determined to continue their search for life on Mars. The way things are going right now, it looks like that quest will reach fruition long before anyone ever discovers signs of life in the Labour Party. It’s not that I saw the defeat of New Labour at the ballot box last year as a prelude to a rerun of the Bennite years. Apart from anything else, the weight of the left both inside and outside Labour is insufficient to permit stuff like that. To revamp a period slogan, it’s never again for “never again”...

Protests shake Putin

Demonstrators took to the streets in cities throughout Russia on 10 December as the latest stage in the campaign against ballot-rigging in the parliamentary elections. Such protests went ahead despite police violence, the mass arrests of protestors, the summary imposition of two-week jail sentences on those arrested on previous demonstrations and the flooding of the capital Moscow with 50,000 police and 2,000 interior troops in preparation for the anti-government rally. Estimates of the numbers demonstrating in Moscow varied from 35,000 to 85,000. In St Petersburg around 10,000 protested. The...

Narrow win for New Zealand Tories

New Zealand’s Tories, the National Party, have been returned to lead the government, but only by the narrowest of margins. National won 59 out of 121 seats in Parliament, and is reliant for a majority on the neoliberal ACT party and centre-right United Future, who got one seat each. Turnout was the lowest since the 1880s - about a million people (26.8%) on the electoral roll did not vote. The saving grace of the election was the result of the concurrently held referendum on the voting system — Mixed Member Proportional Representation (MMP) will be retained. In 1990 National gained a similar...

Islamists gain in Egypt's poll

The second and third stages of elections to the lower house of Egypt's parliament are due on 14 December and 3 January. Elections to the upper house will start on 29 January, and the new parliament - whose powers are still uncertain - will meet in March. In the first stage of the lower-house elections, on 28 November, the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party won 36.6% of the party-list vote. The more devout and rigid "salafist" Islamists of Al-Nour got 24.4%, making an Islamist total of 61%. Anecdotal evidence is that many workers voted for the Islamists on grounds that they seemed...

Syrian state lashes out as sanctions bite

The Syrian police state is now responsible for over 4,000 deaths since the opposition movement emerged onto the streets in March. This week, the regime staged local elections — part of a sham “reform” programme — with 17,000 candidates standing for 43,000 seats. State media reported voters were “flocking” to the polls. The on-the-ground opposition inside the country called for a boycott, and turn-out seems to have been poor. On Sunday the opposition called an open-ended “Strike for Dignity” — the main effects being closure of small businesses and keeping children home from school. The strikers...

Climate change: their solutions and ours

The Durban Climate Conference, which participants are hailing as a great success, concluded on 12 December. Its 194 participants (including the world’s “big three” emitters — USA, China and India) agreed a legal framework for reducing carbon emissions and controlling temperature increase. The world has been here before; negotiations at Kyoto and Cancun also presented themselves as historic achievements. Writing before the conference , Matt Weekes looks at how the workers’ movement can develop our own solutions for fighting climate change which don’t rely on bourgeois diplomacy.

US withdraws from Iraq

By Martin Thomas At the end of December, the last US troops will withdraw from Iraq, eight years and eight months after the invasion of March 2003. Bungling to the last, the USA sent vice-president Joe Biden to tour Iraq declaring the operation a success, and he held forth to a puzzled audience on the great things the USA has done in Baku. Baku is in Azerbaijan, not Iraq. The invasion was the product of a surge of US triumphalism following the collapse of European and Russian Stalinism in 1991, easy US military successes in Kuwait (1991), Bosnia (1995), and Kosova (1999), and seeming US...

Solidarity 228

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What the Greek left is saying

By Theodora Polenta As Greece struggles through huge cuts under the instructions of the European Union/ European Central Bank/ IMF "Troika", a lot of emotive language has been used, drawing parallels with the Greeks' national liberation struggle against the German-fascist invasion in the 1940s. Greek flags, and alliances with nationalist and chauvinist forces, have been widely accepted, even by parts of the left, as symbolising the struggle for national liberation, the struggle of the dependent Greek nation against the German and EU imperialism. A post-modernist analysis, offered by Greek...

Euro-leaders set course for worse crisis

By Martin Thomas David Cameron's veto, on 9 December, of the plan for a new economic treaty backed by all 26 other European Union governments, may shake British politics and Britain's future relations with the EU. The 9 December summit itself may shake more. The 26 adopted a plan which has little chance of smoothing the financial crisis shaking the eurozone, and may make it worse. Felix Salmon, economic commentator for Reuters, was the sharpest of many mainstream economists who saw it that way: "A continent which has risen to multiple occasions over the past 66 years has, in 2011, decided to...

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