Solidarity 307, 11 December 2013

At least twice in early December, anarchist students at Sussex University have carried out physical attacks on Socialist Workers Party stalls. Sussex Autonomous Students (sussexasn.tumblr.com) report: “A few days ago the SWP turned up to one of the Sussex 5 Solidarity demos. They brought a mass of placards and papers, which they proceeded to distribute from the obligatory stall. We binned their placards, turned over their stall and burnt their papers.” AWL supporters at Sussex report that a second, similar incident took place at the demonstration against management repression and in support of...

“Even more austerity than we’d expected” was the verdict from the mainstream, conservative-minded Institute for Fiscal Studies on the government’s Autumn Statement of 5 December. “The rich”, said the IFS, are “likely to do better than the poor between 2011-12 and 2015-16”. The aim of the government’s cuts was always to use the crisis to shift the balance of forces in society heavily in favour of the rich, and against the working class, and so to ensure high profits in an eventual recovery. Chancellor George Osborne says the recovery is now underway. Evidence is very patchy so far, but possibly...

I missed an important point in my article in Solidarity 305 (“How schools should change” 27 November). Schools should include comfortable spaces for students to socialise in their breaks from study. They don’t. Schools provide staffrooms and workrooms (good or not-so-good) for staff, and sometimes common-rooms for older (Sixth Form) students. The other students, for their breaks, are bundled out into playgrounds, often cramped, often bleak, often raucous, often cold and damp, where there isn’t even space to sit down comfortably. The traditional refuge of the shy or timid student, the school...

I think my reply to Yassamine Mather covers Janine Booth’s first point about the introduction to Workers’ Liberty 3/1 ( “Prioritise clarity over rhetorical flourish” , Solidarity 306, 4 December 2013). “Of course modern political Islam is modern... but [it] responds to modern problems by invoking bygone times as a model. That political Islamists hark back to the caliphate (Islamic empire) and to what they see as original Muslim virtue is not a ‘chauvinistically offensive’ slur on them, but what they pride themselves on”. Janine queries the term “much of the Islamic world” in a much-reviled...

In November 2013 Universities UK, the organisation which represents university managements, published guidelines which said it could be discriminatory (undermining of free speech) for universities not to allow segregation by gender in meetings if external speakers wanted that arrangement. The ruling has been backed by the National Union of Students. Under pressure, Universities UK withdrew the guidelines on 13 December. The ruling said steps to accommodate the wishes or beliefs of those opposed to segregation should “not result in a religious group being prevented from having a debate in...

On Sunday 1 December, a 13 year old girl died in the Xirokrini district of Thessaloniki (north-east Greece), where she lived with her unemployed mother. Originally from Serbia, the girl had lived in Thessaloniki for the last ten years. Her mother struggled along by doing casual jobs such as cleaning houses and washing dishes in restaurants. In recent months the jobs ran out. According to neighbours, the mother and daughter had lived for the last quarter without electricity. It had been cut off because of their inability to pay. On Sunday the mother lit a brazier to warm the flat. Around 10 pm...

The US military will no longer publicly disclose whether prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are on hunger strike. Hunger strikes have taken place at the prison camp since it was opened in 2002, but normally it was possible for the press to discover how many in-mates were making the protest, and how many of them were being force fed. A Guantanamo Bay official said the camp authorities would “no longer further [prisoners’] protests by reporting the numbers to the public.” The US holds 164 prisoners at Guantanamo, most of them without charge. Earlier this year, over a hundred of them were refusing food...

“The old dies and the new cannot manage to see day. In the interim a large diversity of morbid symptoms surges forth” (Antonio Gramsci) The latest data on the state of Italy’s economy puts it in second place behind Greece for the level of absolute and relative poverty, with half of its population on €1,000 a month or less and nearly 45% of young people without work. The victory this weekend of the Blairite mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, in the election for leader of the centre-left Democratic Party only added salt to the wounds. Renzi is a vile opportunist and enthusiastic cheerleader for...

On 29 November, the Home Office attempted to deport Isa Muazu, a Nigerian refugee. Muazu had been on hunger strike for over 100 days against his detention at Harmondsworth immigration removal centre and was feared to be close to death. However, the privately-charted jet the Home Office hired to deport him was not allowed to land by Nigerian authorities, and Muazu is now back in the UK. The Home Office says that his deportation now has Nigerian approval and that they will try again. Muazu says returning to Nigeria would put him at risk from the Islamist militia Boko Haram, which he refused to...

The Communication Workers Union (CWU) is recommending a deal to its members in Royal Mail that secures a 9% pay increase over three years and legal protection against outsourcing, casualisation, and zero-hours contracts, but also radically restricts the union’s ability to strike. The deal creates new structures of governance and mediation that the CWU will be legally committed to exhaust before its members can strike at a local level. The agreement also makes clear that any national strike would negate the legal protections offered: “The Employer shall be entitled to notify the CWU at any time...