Solidarity 453, 8 November 2017

Editorial from Solidarity 453 The public scandal which has erupted in the wake of reports of historical and current sexual assaults in Hollywood, and now the UK Parliament, has brought to light a day-to-day reality. The #metoo campaign was “successful” because it touched on a truth. Almost every woman has experienced some form of sexual assault or harassment. The public conversation in wake of the reports and allegations is welcome and important. The revelations about Harvey Weinstein, with which this public conversation began, showed how men in positions of power can perpetrate abuse on, in...

Had it not been distributed as a leaflet at this year’s Labour Party conference, Moshe Machover’s article “Anti-Zionism Does Not Equal Anti-Semitism” would have been just another turgid and distasteful article which had found a natural home for itself in the pages of the Weekly Worker. A longer version of the same article – entitled “Don’t Apologise – Attack” – had been published in Weekly Worker four months earlier. According to that article: • Anyone who thought that a retweet by Naz Shah MP – which had suggested that Israel (and, presumably, its population) should be relocated to the USA –...

I’m entirely with David Pendletone ( Solidarity 452) that we should seek to win the labour movement and the Labour Party to a programme for a workers’ Europe. But what if we fail to win a majority for that before March 2019? We should assume no “inevitability of gradualness”. But even if we, around Solidarity , increase our forces twenty-fold in the next year — twenty times more activists, twenty times more readers, twenty times more influence — we may not win Labour conference 2018 to that programme. And, even if we do, a workers’ Europe is not a programme that can realised by action in one...

Since the late 1990s the Channel Tunnel and the port of Calais have been a gathering place for migrants seeking a route into Britain. Although a migrant make-shift campsite known as the Calais Jungle became well known in the last few years, there have been many camps established by migrants on plots of unused land. Numbers of migrants reached a peak during the 2015 migrant crisis, when the Calais Jungle had over 7,000 people living in it. The Jungle was cleared in October 2016 and 6,400 people were relocated across France, often forcibly and violently. Possessions were destroyed, homes were...

Another day, another revelation. The super-rich avoid paying tax. The leak of 13.4 million data files (the “Paradise Papers”) to the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, shared with media around the world, has shone a light on the pathologically anti-social behaviour of the rich pile up their wealth and refusing to contribute to the financing of hospitals, schools and the care of the old, sick and disabled. They do this by getting fancy lawyers to set up obscure companies, massage profit figures, and stash money away in accounts in low-tax countries like the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands (many of...

The Labor minority government in the Australian state of Queensland has called an early election for the state’s unicameral parliament on 25 November. Current polls show Labor at around 37% or 38% — what it had at the last election in 2015 — and the main conservative party, the LNP, down from 41% to 34% or 35%. But the demagogic right-wing One Nation Party, Queensland’s equivalent of UKIP, is at 18% at some polls after going down to 0.9% in 2015. The Alternative Vote system, used in Queensland as in other Australian states and in Australian federal elections, gives great weight to agreements...

Over 100,000 Kurds have fled Kirkuk since the Iraqi army and the Hash’d al-Shaabi militia seized control of the territory, in the face of an overwhelming vote for an independent Kurdistan. Kirkuk is of great importance for both Kurds and the Iraqi government. Its oilfields would have made any potential Kurdish state economically viable and allow it to quickly establish international trade links. Few oilfields now remain in the hands of the Kurdish peshmerga fighters. The stepping down of President Masoud Barzani and the recent death of former Kurdish Iraqi President Jalal Talabani have left a...