Solidarity 461, 7 February 2018

Marching for the NHS

On Saturday 3 February, Health Campaigns Together and the People’s Assembly organised a demonstration for the NHS in central London. Despite pouring rain, the march drew tens of thousands from all over the UK, including organised delegations of hospital workers, and local NHS campaign groups, such as Fighting 4 Life Lincolnshire, which is working to save emergency healthcare services in Grantham. The march was lively, if damp, and addressed by various public figures and health sector trade unionists as well as John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn. The demonstration should mark the start of a major...

Save our homes!

In Leeds, an entire working class community are threatened with their homes being demolished and replaced by homes they can’t afford. The Wordsworth and Sugar Hill Estates on Oulton at the edge of Leeds are made up of seventy ex-National Coal Board houses. After the privatisation of the coal industry these houses were handed over to the Pemberstone Group. They are seeking planning permission to evict the tenants, knock down the housing and replace it with expensive commuter properties for sale. Only 15% of which would be so called “affordable” homes. This will mean the loss of much needed...

Deaths from malnutrition on the rise

In 2016, malnutrition was listed as a contributory factor in 351 deaths in the UK, and the main cause of death in 66 cases, up from 59 the previous year and the highest figures in a decade. Many of the cases in which malnutrition contributes to a death involve older people who are unable to feed themselves adequately due to frailty and social isolation. Caroline Abrahams, a director of Age UK, has reported that a third of elderly people admitted to hospital or care homes suffer from some degree of malnutrition. Amid a global food surplus, the issue is not a shortage of food for people – but a...

Nationalise big contractors!

The share price of the outsourcing company Capita, after plunging on 30 January, has started recovering slightly as Solidarity goes to press. Capita has 73,000 employees, and enjoys contracts to run a vast and unwieldy range of public services, for which it has no special expertise, including in the NHS. It looks like the Government will be willing and able to stop Capita following Carillion into collapse, and the Capita bosses have cancelled dividend payments rather than (like the Carillion bosses) shovelling money out of the door as quickly as possible as risks of collapse emerge. The case...

Open up Brexit debate in Labour

The planned Labour Party leadership “away day” to reconsider policy on Brexit has been flagged up as coming in “early February”, so must be soon. May even have happened by the time this issue of Solidarity reaches readers. Sadly, Brexit and free-movement policy were denied debating time at Labour’s 2017 conference, partly thanks to a push by much of the Labour left to deny the issue priority votes. So Labour’s reconsideration is happening in exclusive conclaves rather than in broad debate. It is still possible for pro-free-movement, pro-open-borders left-wingers to influence the debate by...

Conspiracy theory goes international

Over the last year or so Jackie Walker has campaigned to present Labour politics as a drama centred on the alleged "lynching" of herself. In May 2016 she was suspended from the Labour Party for allegedly antisemitic comments on Facebook. She was reinstated, and then suspended again in October 2016 for new comments (in public) found to be prejudicial by Jewish Labour members. Despite talk about the issue being "free speech on Israel", none of those comments were about Israel, still less were any of them statements of support for Palestinian rights. Like many, she remains suspended without a...

"We, the democrats and feminists from Muslim backgrounds, have been deleted"

Anissa Hélie is an assistant professor at John Jay College in New York. Her articles include “Multiculturalist Liberalism and Harms to Women: Looking Through the Issue of the ‘Veil’” and “Policing gender, sexuality and ‘Muslimness’” in the book Sexuality in Muslim Contexts: Resistance and Restrictions , which she co-edited with Homa Hoodfar. This interview was conducted by Andy Heintz, a freelance writer based in the US Mid West who writes about US foreign policy, universal rights, gender equality, and social movements. He has been published in progressive outlets like Foreign Policy in Focus...

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