Solidarity 266, 28 November 2012

Law professor Sol Picciotto has proposed a new approach to stop tax avoidance by transnational corporations (TNCs). Over a third of all world trade is within TNCs. That gives them enormous scope to manage their affairs so that their profits appear, and are taxed, in the lowest-tax parts of the world. Starbucks, Google, and Amazon all use this scope so as to pay very little tax in the UK. Socialists object to this; and so do ordinary capitalist governments. There have been many efforts by governments, since the 1930s, to fix the problem, none of them effective. Picciotto bases himself on what...

From Friday 23 November Cyprus is officially subject to a European Union/ European Central Bank/ IMF (Troika) Memorandum. This version of the article is longer than in the printed paper. The decision did not take anybody by surprise. The question was about the timing. Cyprus's presidential elections are due in February. AKEL, the Cypriot Communist Party, which currently governs (Greek) Cyprus, is expected to lose and the right wing Democratic Rally is expected to win. The question was whether president Dimitris Christofias would dare to go down in history as the leader of the first "communist"...

Keith Morrell and Don Thomas are councillors on Southampton Council, representing the Coxford ward. When they campaigned and voted against a budget proposal that would have seen a swimming pool in their ward close, they were disciplined by the Labour Party and eventually left the Labour group, forming an independent “Labour Councillors Against the Cuts” group on the council. Keith and Don spoke to Solidarity about the fight against cuts locally, the potential for anti-cuts Labour councillors to coordinate nationally, and the wider politics the labour movement needs to articulate to mobilise a...