Solidarity 351, 28 January 2015

Free schools failing

Durham Free School, one of the government’s state-funded schools outside of local authority control, has been forced to close after being rated inadequate by Ofsted. Shortly after, Grindon Hall, a free school in Sunderland, was judged by Ofsted to require urgent improvements. Ofsted criticised the school, which is a Christian faith school, for failing to teach its pupils about diversity of race, religion and sexuality in British society. They also found that the school was not tackling “prejudice-based bullying” or pupils’ use of racist and homophobic language. The free school programme, as...

Euro-QE: a conservative sop

The European Central Bank’s Quantitative Easing (QE) plan, announced on 22 January 2015, was a bit more energetic than expected. The good thing about it is that it confirms that EU leaders know their current plans aren’t working, and therefore are more susceptible into being pushed for change. Whether QE as such will help working-class people across Europe is another matter. The plan is shaped so as to exclude for a while buying Greek government bonds. It includes a rule that the ECB won’t own more than 33 per cent of the debt from a single issuer. That keeps Greece out at least until it has...

Rent-controlled housing for all!

Over 635,000 homes in England are empty. For every family in need of a home there are 10 empty houses. Over 200,000 homes have been empty for more than six months. In September 2014 the number of families placed in temporary accommodation was over 60,000, the highest it has been in five years. The number of people who are homeless or in precarious housing situations is likely to be much higher. London, where there is a boom in house building, accounts for 75% of the increase in homelessness. In London there are more than 70 social housing estates being “regenerated”. This affects an estimated...

NHS pay: what's been gained?

As Solidarity went to press on 27 January, news of a deal on NHS pay had just been announced. Unison, Unite, GMB and the Royal College of Midwives have all confirmed they have suspended strikes planned for Thursday 29 January to consult members on an offer from the government. A GMB official said the offer included “the implementation of the 1% pay rise for all NHS staff from April 2015 plus some further improvements for the lowest paid NHS staff.” The details are unclear. However initial publicity suggested that it includes: • A consolidated 1% payment for all staff up to Band 8B from April...

Cuba: alternatives after the thaw

On December 17, 2014, Washington and Havana agreed to a pathbreaking change in a relationship that, for more than fifty years, was characterized by the United States’ efforts to overthrow the Cuban government, including the sponsorship of invasions, naval blockades, economic sabotage, assassination attempts, and terrorist attacks. The new accord set free the remaining three members of the “Cuban Five” group held in US prisons since 1998 and, in exchange, Cuba freed the American Alan Gross and Rolando Sarraf Trujillo, a previously unknown US intelligence agent imprisoned on the island for...

Wealth trickling up

If you didn’t see The Super Rich and Us, I would really recommend you look at it on i-player. The first episode covered Britain’s property market and tax laws. The second focused on the growth of international financial markets. Presenter Jacques Peretti begins each episode with these stark observations: “The super rich are taking over. 85 people now own the same as half the world’s population. Never before has money been so polarised. The 21st century will be the most unequal in human history.” It is invaluable to have the facts about wealth inequality spelled out to a mass audience in this...

Eichmann on TV

"People say 'it cannot be true. You invent this. Such things are not possible.' I say, 'if I could make up such things, I would be in Hollywood, not running a cheap hotel in Jerusalem." Rebecca Front as Mrs. Landau, a Holocaust survivor, in The Eichmann Show. The Eichmann Show, the BBC’s dramatisation of the filming and broadcast of the trial of senior Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, in Israel in 1961, is, perhaps, about too much. In its chilling use of archival footage from both the trial and of the genocide itself, the film tries to be a lesson in Holocaust history. In showing the struggle of...

French demos were not like Pegida

To see only a fascist threat in the demonstrations in France of Sunday 11 January would be to misunderstand the nature of the mass sentiments which they expressed. The demonstrations were in no sense a Pegida-style wave – had they been, we would have seen a daily explosion of attacks against people of Arab-Muslim heritage and against Muslim places of worship: and a completely different climate. To be sure, there was a flurry of several dozen such incidents, but a “French Pegida” with four million participants on one Sunday across the whole country would make for a sinister remake of...

Since 2008, poorest have lost most

According to the government, economic data published this month show ordinary people have begun to benefit from economic growth. Really? A 1.8% annual growth in wages was real growth, but only because of low inflation, which stands at 0.5% on the government’s preferred CPI measure. That does little to counteract the fall in real wages since 2008, and the figures may over-estimate growth in wages. As the Resolution Foundation has pointed out, government figures exclude 4.5 million self employed people who, on average, have seen their wages squeezed 20-30% more than other sectors of the...

Notes on staff representative bodies in France

Notes on staff representative bodies in France (for Olivier Delbeke's article in Solidarity 351) DP: Délégués du personnel, staff delegates. They are elected in workplaces by workers where more than 11 workers are employed. These delegates present monthly dossiers of demands of workers in the workplace. It is one of the advances won in the general strike of June 1936. NAOs, or Annual Obligatory Negotiations also exist, where pay and qualifications are discussed. CE: Comités d’entreprise, works councils, created in 1945. These committees can sometimes be controlled by bosses where there is no...

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