Solidarity 360, 15 April 2015

After members of the rail union RMT working for Network Rail rejected a pay offer by 93%, the company made an improved offer, which union reps will meet to discuss on 16 April. A Network Rail worker spoke to Solidarity . Network Rail management cannot have it both ways. While our recent pay increases have been better than in standard in the private sector, they have still been effectively holding settlements — i.e., in line with inflation, but not an improvement in our standard of living. Now, with the economy supposedly doing better, we were first offered a pay freeze for 2015, then only RPI...

The Tories, their arrogance boosted by having got through five years of cuts and wage squeeze and still having some chance of re-election, promise a cut in inheritance tax. They have already cut corporation tax and the top rate of income tax. The Labour leadership promises bitty taxes on the rich here and there, but nothing large-scale. On 13 April Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls publicly rebuked the right-wing leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Jim Murphy, for saying there will be no new cuts under a Labour government. Murphy was striving to make ground against the Scottish National Party, which...

We should add two demands to Pete Gilman's list in his excellent article on socialist housing policy ( Solidarity 358): nationalisation of land, and public ownership (state and municipal) of construction. As Pete points out, most of the dwellings being built in London and other housing-shortage areas are for sale or rent at luxury levels. Yet they are not palaces with huge gardens. Mostly they are small flats built to ordinary construction specifications. The profits from their high prices go to property developers or landlords. The real-estate advisers Savills report that: "London residential...

Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory supporters Gill Kennett and Dean Kirk were elected as Labour councillors in Hull, but expelled from the party for refusing to vote for cuts. Dean is standing in the May council elections as Hull Red Labour. We spoke to them about the campaign. Another former Labour councillor, ASLEF activist Gary Wareing, is also standing for HRL. Our campaign has been going for five months. We have 25,000 leaflets and letters out already and another 10,000 to go out; regular campaign stalls; and door knocking. We are discussing with people the need not to fall into the...

All the main storylines of Cameron’s Britain are there in this book. The food banks. The explosion of payday loans. Plunging wages for young workers, soaring rents and house prices, and almost no social house-building. The hype about government debt as the monster threatening us all. The social cuts first pushed with the story that they were necessary to tame debt, and then continued, when they leave debt still rising fast, with the story that the capitalist free market will eventually bring prosperity if only liberated from social overheads and from taxes on profits and high incomes. The...

Uetricht begins his account of the transformation of the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) and their 2012 strike by counterposing two incidents representing the opposite faces of teacher trade unionism. One is represented by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, sitting on a panel to discuss Chicago’s Infrastructure Trust — a public-private partnership initiative which ushered in private involvement in public schools. Speaking alongside Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel she praised the initiative and made no mention of the Mayor’s hostile treatment of teachers and their...

9 April was the 150th anniversary of the surrender of the South in the American Civil War. In this speech given at recent AWL public meetings, Sacha Ismail explains why that war and what came after are so important. The American Civil War is not dry, dusty history. It is relevant to the inspiring protests against racism going on in the United States now. The US of today — a capitalist democracy, but one deeply racist and unequal even by the standards of capitalism — was created by revolution, but also the betrayal of that revolution. Between 1861 and 1865, the US fought a bloody war in which...

After the re-invigoration of the squares movement with mobilisations in support of the Syriza-led government and against the Troika (EU-ECB-IMF) blackmail, the movement is slowly starting to intervene with mobilisations which are not anti-government (except those of the anarchist groups) but seek to “remind” the government of its election commitments and to counter the lTroika’s ultimatums. The process is slow, but we can see the first steps of it. There were demonstrations of 10,000 in Thessaloniki / Skouries-Chalkidiki against the gold mining activities of Eldorado Gold and to “remind” the...

A survey reported in the Guardian of 13 April has found that the UK is one of the world's least religious countries, as measured by people's opinions. Only 30% of those surveyed in the UK said they were religious. 53% said they were not religious, 13% said flat-out that they were atheists, and the other 4% "didn't know". Apart from China, where there would be government pressure against calling yourself religious, the only other countries to report smaller numbers of "religious" people were Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Sweden, and Japan. So why does the UK have an...

From the new wealth produced by the labours of the average household in the USA, the shareholders of US big business will scoop around $10,000 in the coming year. The figure was about $8,000 in 2014, and is expected to rise. It doesn't include the gains from higher share prices which shareholders may or may not cash in. It counts only the hard cash they get in dividends and operations in which businesses buy back their own shares. Some of the shareholders are also workers, contributing through their labour to the surplus value they get back via shareholdings. The USA has a much wider...