Solidarity 310, 22 January 2014

On 22 January, student activists will demonstrate in London to support the campaign by outsourced workers in the University of London, to oppose police repression and to oppose the threatened closure of the University of London Union. The following day, students will take action in solidarity with the national Higher Education workers’ pay dispute, and on 29 January a meeting in Birmingham will discuss and plan the next steps for student struggle. Class struggle in the higher education sector is symbolised by the vast pay rises handed to university Vice Chancellors (VCs) this year. VCs at the...

As Tube unions, passenger and community groups launch the “Hands Off London Transport” campaign in the latest battle over the funding and future of the Tube, Janine Booth’s book Plundering London Underground , which documents the struggles against the introduction of the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) from 1998, and its ultimate demise, is significant and timely. It is only three years since the demise of the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) on the Tube, which saw billions siphoned off to privateers. Yet the Tube is now facing a new funding crisis. This government, with the full backing of...

As part of the government’s response to the Francis Report in misconduct in the NHS, they have introduced a “duty of candour” for clinical staff. It is designed as an antidote to the bullying culture that led to the abuses at the Mid-Staffs NHS Trust. A recent study by Durham University found that nearly half of all NHS staff have witnessed bullying at work. Another survey found that a quarter of doctors and a third of nurses say they have been bullied into doing things they know are bad for patient care. Bullying is endemic in the NHS. It creates a toxic atmosphere in which patients die. The...

Inessa Armand (1874-1920) was a pioneering socialist feminist who played a key role in promoting the emancipation of women in the international socialist movement, and after the Russian revolution. She was born in a working-class district in the north of Paris on 8 May 1874. Her father was a French opera singer, and her mother an actor of Anglo-French parentage. Following her father’s death, when Inessa was five, she moved to an area outside Moscow and was raised by her aunt and grandmother. Inessa’s aunt worked as a governess for an upper-middle-class Russian family, headed by Evgenii Armand...

Workers at the Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, have contacted the University of London's "3 Cosas" campaign for equality between outsourced and directly-employed staff to express their support and solidarity. The workers at active in UID-DER, a rank-and-file network in the Turkish labour movement which sent solidarity greetings to 3 Cosas from its 15 December conference (see here ). The Hacettepe workers write: Our dear class brothers and sisters, We are sending our greetings to you from Hacettepe University, Turkey. We are workers who had been dismissed because of our struggle against...

The major factor of recent months in France is Hollande's loss of the credit he had when elected in 2012. This is a longer version of the article than in the printed paper. It presents a somewhat different angle on the Dieudonné affair from Yves Coleman's article in Solidarity 309 . Hollande was able to beat Sarkozy not because of his programme and his campaign, but because the masses sought a political way out, and that will to get rid of Sarkozy was boosted by the campaign of the Front de Gauche and [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon, especially following on from the success of the Paris demonstration of...

In Solidarity 242 (18 April 2012), we began publishing a series of recollections and reflections from activists who had been involved with the “third camp” left in the United States — those “unorthodox” Trotskyists who believed that the Soviet Union was not a “workers’ state” (albeit a “degenerated” one), but an exploitative form of class rule to be as opposed as much as capitalism. They came to be organised under the slogan “neither Washington nor Moscow.” The assessment of the “third camp” tradition by the majority of the modern-day revolutionary left is bound up with the continuing holy...

Mike Kyriazopoulos, a Workers’ Liberty supporter based in New Zealand/Aotearoa and active in Fightback, died on 18 January 2014 after a long battle with Motor Neurone Disease. This is a letter he wrote to comrades in April 2013. Early this year I was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. It appears as though the “progress” of the disease (oddly Stalinist terminology) is quite rapid. So I wanted to thank all of you who know me for your political guidance, solidarity, friendship and love over the years. I first came across the AWL at York University Labour Club. But I realised the group was...