Solidarity 249, 13 June 2012

At the start of June Egyptian activists rallied to remember Khaled Said, a young man killed two years ago by Mubarak’s police, sparking protests that eventually brought down the dictator. Click here to download text as pdf leaflet At Said’s grave, Laila Marzouk, his mother, said she could not bring herself to vote for either of the remaining candidates in Egypt’s presidential election: “I will not choose between the plague and cholera.” Those candidates are Ahmed Shafiq, a former prime minister and long-time ally of ousted former president Hosni Mubarak and Mohammed Mursi of the Muslim...

Theodora Polenta discusses the challenge posed to the left by the possibility of a Syriza victory in Greece’s election on 17 June. The revolutionary left has a duty to prepare the workers’ movement about the consequences, including a deterioration of living conditions, when Greece is forced out of the EU. We must do that without surrendering to today’s blackmail from the pro-memorandum forces: accept the cuts, or face empty shelves in the shops, no petrol, no money in the banks, etc. The blackmail is powerful because there is a large element of truth in it. Better to face that squarely than to...

Hugo Radice spoke to Solidarity about the eurozone crisis. This version of the interview is revised and expanded from the version in the printed paper. What concessions do you think are likely from the EU on "growth strategies"? Some left-wing economists, for example the EuroMemorandum group , have been calling for a growth strategy throughout the crisis. But until recently most media, academic and business economists believed that a strategy of cutting public deficits would automatically lead to a resumption of private-sector growth. But by the end of 2011, not only were commentators like...

Daniela Gabor is a lecturer at the Bristol Business School and an expert on the economics of banking. She gave Solidarity her views about Greece and the eurozone crisis. If a left government is formed after 17 June, and it repudiates the memorandum, the Troika is likely to cut off the bail-out funds. Would a Greek government run out of cash? Greece has had a big budget deficit. The Greek economists I talk to say that if Greece stays on the austerity plan, then it will have a primary surplus [a budget surplus if you don’t count its debt payments] by the end of 2012. However, a government which...

The Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) that will control the NHS budget under the Tories’ new system have to serve just 75% of the population in their given geographical area. CCGs will attempt to use this flexibility to dump the most expensive, high risk patients. A recent investigation by a local Primary Care Trust found that a GP practice formerly run by Dr Charles Alessi, the new chair of the National Association of Primary Care (the pro-Health and Social Care Act lobby group), de-registered 48 elderly patients because “their demand for GP time and other resources was high”. The...

Organised money defeated organised labour. That is the Democratic Party’s take on its humbling defeat in a recall election (6 June) called against incumbent Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker. That and the ever familiar lament that workers no longer seem capable of voting in solidarity with embattled public sector workers and their unions. 38% of households with union members voted for the incumbent, as did a majority of non-college graduates. Walker carried the 10 poorest counties in the state by a 13% margin. The Wisconsin results paralleled voter-approved public sector pension cuts...

Only four months ago, tens of thousands of marched on Syntagma Square to stress their rejection of externally-imposed austerity, and dozens of buildings burned to the ground as rioters battled it out with police on the streets of Athens. But the mood in the Greek capital which I am currently visiting is completely different to what it must have been on that night in February. The picture is instead characterised by a strange sense of apprehension. It is almost as if politics is somehow on hold until the country goes to the polls in a crucial election this coming Sunday 17 June. The choice the...

After the French legislative elections (second round on June 17) it looks as though President François Hollande’s centre-left Parti Socialiste (PS) will control the National Assembly. Turn-out has been low, and the far left did badly in the election. The two largest revolutionary groups, the New Anticapitalist Party and Lutte Ouvrière, got around 1% each. The “Left Front”, a left-reformist lash-up of the Left Party (a leftwing split from the PS led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon) and the French Communist Party, got 7%. This indicates that the great hope of the CP — of being able to participate in a...

Ludwic Moquinbeaudry from the Quebec students’ movement ASSE spoke to Solidarity . We are now focusing on the next big demonstrations. On the 22nd of every month we have had a big demonstration, and the next big demonstration will be June 22. We don’t know if we will break the records of the past demonstrations. We started the student strike [against tuition fee rises] on February 13 and for nine weeks the Government thought the movement would die by itself. Seeing that that strategy was not working, they started negotiations, and they tried to split the students. They expelled CLASSE from the...

The Spanish government announced on Saturday 9 June that it would seek a financial bailout from the European Union. Previously, for months, it had said that it had everything under control and there was no question of a bailout. Eurozone finance ministers quickly said they’d lend up to 100 billion euros to the Spanish government to enable it to patch up dodgy banks. Although Spain’s budget-balance record was better than Germany’s before 2007, and Spain’s bank regulation was applauded in 2008 as exceptionally good, Spanish banks have eventually been brought down by the collapse of real-estate...