Solidarity 302, 6 November 2013

Surveying homophobia

In this two part documentary, Stephen Fry and the director Fergus O’Brien set out to survey what the situation is for LGBT people around the world. A laudable task, and a good way to use your celebrity. In some ways the documentary lives up to its good intentions to expose homophobia across the world; the interviews with victims and survivors of some of the most extreme consequences of homophobia moved me. Fry’s journey surveying the situation for LGBT people took him to the US, Uganda, Brazil, Russia, and India. He did not visit the likes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Yemen or Mauritania...

How the US uses torture

Western democracies have prided themselves in applying humane standards to the treatment of prisoners of war. This treatment is encapsulated in the Geneva Convention, first formulated in 1864 and modified since, most recently in 1949. They have also signed up to the UN Convention against Torture. These conventions have been flouted by some democratic states (France in Algeria, Britain in Northern Ireland, USA in Vietnam, ...). The US explicitly banned torture and harsh treatment by military interrogators after the Vietnam war, introducing the Army Field Manual on Interrogation (FM 34-52) in...

We need our own remembrance

On 28 October, the Daily Telegraph accused the University of London Union (ULU) of having “banned” representatives of the union from attending the University’s official Remembrance Service. Quite how the union’s democratic body taking a decision not to officially attend constitutes a “ban” is beyond comprehension. However, what is in danger of being lost here is the debate about the politics of Remembrance, over and above any manufactured “scandal” or constitutional wrangle within ULU’s Senate. The chief charge laid against those who refuse to engage with official Remembrance ceremonies is...

The legacy of Norman Geras

On Friday 18 October, Marxist political philosopher Norman Geras died of cancer at the age of 70. Geras was born in what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1943 and came to England to study at Oxford in 1962. He graduated with a first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1965 and took up a teaching post at Manchester University where he remained for the rest of his academic life, retiring in 2003. He became more widely known in recent years through “Normblog”, which quickly became one of the most widely read and influential political blogs. Official obituaries, including that from his friend...

Why we don't oppose nuclear power

We recognise that climate change alters the conditions in which we formulate our socialist politics. Climate change is ultimately caused by capitalist social relations of production, which permit capitalists to simultaneously exploit wage labour while despoiling the ecology of the planet for the pursuit of profit. Climate change is already impacting on working class communities across the globe. Floods, drought, wild fires and storms are frequently in the news. Climate change is already affecting food supplies, ecosystems, water and health. It is already integral to government policy on energy...

Against racism, against religious reaction

Over the past weeks, there has been an online outcry against an article AWL published in 2006 which has been attacked as “Islamophobic”. Over our next editions, Solidarity will feature debate and discussion on the article and the issues. Here, we reprint (abridged) a statement from the AWL Executive Committee in response to the outcry, and carry a letter from an AWL comrade. Future editions will carry further debate. Much of the recent online response to a 2006 AWL article on Marxists’ attitude to religion and religious fundamentalist politics has acted as a reminder of how disoriented much of...

Lessons from the Grangemouth defeat

It wasn’t just the Ineos workforce in Grangemouth or Unite the Union which suffered a major defeat last month. It was all of us in the trade union movement. Ineos workers will see their basic pay frozen until the end of 2016. There will be no bonus payments until then either. The shift allowance is being cut from £10,000 to £7,500. Overtime rates and holiday entitlements are being cut, and staffing levels are likely to be cut as well. Contractual redundancy pay is being replaced by the statutory minimum, and the final salary pension scheme is being replaced by a defined contributions one...

How the media attacked our movement

It’s been a busy week for media hacks who hate trade unionists. And what better opportunity for hacks to vent their spleen than the fallout from the Ineos dispute in Grangemouth? The Sunday Times (27 October) led the way with lengthy articles about the contents of e-mails sent or received by former Unite Ineos convenor Stevie Deans. A dossier of these e-mails had been “passed to police last week”. But subsequent press coverage suggested that the e-mails had also been passed on to half of Fleet Street. And the source of the “dossier” was Ineos itself — hardly a disinterested party in the matter...

Take the power!

Thousands of people in Britain will die needlessly this winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes adequately. Many hundreds of thousands more will have to chose between heating and eating. Since Ed Miliband spoke on energy prices at Labour Conference, a debate has been raging on snug TV sofas and in temperature-controlled offices of newspapers about how energy prices are affecting people and what sticking-plaster policy will play well in key marginals. Scarcely mentioned, though, has been the real answer: take the energy companies into public ownership and put them under democratic...

For debate, not bans!

A culture of trying to ban people you don’t like is edging into the student left. Administrative exclusions are fairly common on the right wing of the student movement. Right-wing or “apolitical” student union officers will often find excuses for shutting down left-wing meetings and activity; but they won’t call them bans. It is on the student left that a culture of banning, more openly proclaimed as what it is, is starting to develop. Such bans are usually aimed not against right-wingers, but against others on the left. Following the Socialist Workers Party’s terrible and cynical mishandling...

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