Solidarity 244, 2 May 2012

Those comrades who live near the poshest millionaire villas at Winnington Close, Hampstead may have noticed the removal vans over the last few days shipping out the Picassos and the Chagalls from number 7. This pad, worth about £10 million, was the British residence of the erstwhile Saadi Qadaffi, now hiding out in exile in Niger. It is in the process of confiscation as part of criminal assets by the National Transitional Council in Libya. Saadi Qadaffi is disputing their claim — although he may be stretching it a bit if he thinks Hampstead will again one day be the backdrop to his playboy...

Dave Spencer died on 24 April 2012, at the age of 71. He was one of the very first people to join the Workers’ Fight group, forerunner of the AWL, when it “went public” in the British labour movement in October 1967. Before that Workers’ Fight, a tiny group formed in a faction fight within the Militant group, had put all its publishing efforts in working on Workers’ Republic, the theoretical magazine of the Irish Workers’ Group, hoping to help consolidate the IWG as a Trotskyist organisation. Like many of the early Workers’ Fight members, Dave had first (from about 1960, I think) been active...

The labour movement can and must push back the Tory government on individual policies. To do more than damage limitation, however, the labour movement needs to drive this government from office. This is a longer version of the article than in the printed paper. Seriously to propose policies like heavy taxation of the rich, or expropriation and democratic control of the banks and other big financial outfits, we need also to propose a government which might carry them out. Yet Labour, under Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, promises only slight tweaks to Osborne's policy. Routine labour movement...

This year’s National Union of Students conference (24-26 April, Sheffield) saw left-wing student activist groups, most notably the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts , defeat the NUS leadership on a range of issues. These votes reflected the changed, more radical atmosphere in the student movement after the struggles of the last two years. At the same time, there were signs that NUS’s bureaucratic degeneration is nonetheless continuing. Rather than celebrating its victories as sufficient, the student left must use them as footholds and levers to build grassroots activism and generate a...

The Netherlands' right-wing, neo-liberal, fiercely pro-cuts coalition government collapsed over the weekend 21-22 April, unable to agree on measures to reduce the country's budget deficit to the EU's 3% target in 2013. This collapse should, and must on some level, strengthen the hand of the labour movement in arguing against cuts. The Financial Times (25 April) reports, however: "Anyone expecting the Netherlands to turn towards the anti-austerity prescriptions of neo-Keynesian economists in London and New York has another think coming... "The idea that wealthy countries like the Netherlands...