Solidarity 329, 25 June 2014

The right and Iraq The USA and most other big-power governments (including China, which has huge oil interests in Iraq) have followed a Saudi call for “a national conciliation government” in Iraq. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has confined itself to saying: “We warned long ago that the affair that the Americans and the Britons stirred up there [in Iraq] wouldn’t end well”. The US has got a pledge from Maliki to form a new government by 1 July, but may resign itself to Maliki heading it. The Sunni minority in Baghdad is reckoned to have fallen to 12% (as against 35% pre-2003) over ten years of...

The May 1979 general election, in which Labour Party leaders who had systematically turned against their working-class base since winning office in 1974 were defeated by Thatcher’s Tories, triggered rank-and-file revolt in the Labour Party. Local Labour activists, and for a while even some trade union leaders, rallied around the slogan “Never again”. They vowed to win changes in Labour Party structure and policy which would tie future Labour governments to the mandates and interests of the labour movement. The revolt surged forward through 1980 and 1981, and into a Labour deputy leadership...

This a welcome re-issue of a booklet published shortly after the miners’ strike by Socialist Organiser (a forerunner of Workers' Liberty). Alongside the original articles and illustrations there are updates and a new introduction. As a compact but highly readable account of the strike and the lessons to be drawn from it, I can recommend Class Against Class unreservedly. The reader is taken through a, more-or-less, blow by blow narrative of the strike with many eye-witness accounts from NUM activists and their supporters. The important debates that raged at the time are all discussed in depth...

There is a lot of reference on the British left to “Islamophobia”, but less actual discussion about what it means. Do Muslims in Britain suffer oppression as Muslims, and if so what kind? This article will argue that Muslims in Britain do suffer specifically anti-Muslim oppression and bigotry, but that in general anti-Muslim racism is a better way to understand and describe it. Islamophobia The use of “Islamophobia” to describe anti-Muslim phenomena blurs the distinct concepts of Muslims as people , Islam as a religion (which like all religions is an extremely broad, variegated spectrum of...

The Christmas of 1969 was a turning point for me. I was a month off my ninth birthday when my sister gathered up all the selection boxes and various other sweets and treats and parcelled them up for the pot-bellied, fly-covered starving black kids who appeared in our living room every teatime all the way from Biafra. I didn’t declare then that I was a socialist. But I did carry what felt like huge burden of concern that I had some responsibility to sort things out. Immediately, that meant giving all our chocolate away. In the long term, it meant finding out about how the world works and why...

Personal Independence Payment, the benefit launched last year to replace Disability Living Allowance, has already run into trouble. Like Universal Credit, the new benefit combining payments to working-age claimants currently made through Jobseekers’ Allowance, Income Support and Working Tax Credit, PIP is being piloted in Northern England before being extended to the rest of country. It is supposed to be in place by the end of next year although it now seems almost certain that the deadline will be missed. Despite its limited geographical introduction, there is already a large backlog of...

An interview with French socialist Yves Coleman about the rise of the Front National. This is a longer version of the article than in the printed paper. What do we know about the voting base of the FN (sociologically, demographically, etc.) and how has it changed since 1983? To answer your question I will be obliged to use statistics based on "social professional categories [1] " which are not ideal to understand any social reality. This said, if you compare the results of the European elections in 1984 to the same elections in 2014, the Front National (FN) jumped from 17 to 28% of the votes...

A crowd of about 200 people gathered outside Tottenham Town Hall on Monday night to protest fascism in the area following a racist attack on Saturday night.. A 24 year-old Polish man, believed to be Jewish, was knifed at a music festival in Markfield Park after neo-Nazis from the Zjednoczeni Emigranci (ZE) group stormed the event. They also threw flares and rocks at the crowd. The man who was stabbed was treated at hospital and is recovering well. Unite Against Fascism (UAF), which is led by the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), called a demonstration, to which a good number of activists showed...

Cleaning workers on London Underground are fighting the introduction of biometric fingerprinting machines, which cleaning agency ISS wants workers to use to book on for shifts. ISS cleaners in the RMT union are boycotting the machines. A cleaning worker spoke to Solidarity about the struggle. Biometric fingerprinting takes a print of your capillary blood vessels, which are unique to every one of us. Immigration authorities put biometric data on your passport and visas, to keep track of exactly who is in a country. It’s a “Big Brother” technology. ISS say biometric data will make their pay...