Solidarity 376, 16 September 2015

Northern Irish power-sharing institutions look close to collapse, following a crisis sparked by the murder of former IRA member Kevin McGuigan on 12 August in the Short Strand area of East Belfast. McGuigan’s murder is widely seen as a revenge killing for the murder in May of Gerard “Jock” Davison, at one point one of the IRA’s most senior commanders in Belfast and allegedly responsible, along with McGuigan, for much of the IRA’s vigilante violence against drug dealers in the mid-to-late 1990s. After the two men fell, an internal IRA disciplinary unit “sentenced” McGuigan to a “six-pack” —...

John Percy, one of the founders of the modern Trotskyist movement in Australia, died on 19 August 2015, aged 69, after many years of ill-health. Bob Gould, an Australian Trotskyist who often polemicised with John, nevertheless described him as "more careful, more interested in basic Marxism" than the new leaders of the group which John had long led (the DSP) who expelled him in 2008. One of my memories of John, from a visit to the Sydney office of the DSP in 2001, tells me why. The DSP was discussing with other socialist groups to set up a Socialist Alliance in Australia modelled on the one...

On Monday 14 September the Trade Union Bill had its second reading in parliament, and passed by 317 votes to 284. This is not the end of the struggle against the bill. It is time for the labour movement to pick itself up and start organising against the bill. As the bill was being debated in Parliament on Monday, trade unionists gathered outside to protest. The protest, called at short notice by Ian Hodson, National President of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers' Union (BFAWU), and supported by Right to Strike, Unite the Resistance and the National Shop Stewards Network, was attended by over...

TUC Congress was still in session as Solidarity went to press (15 September), but there were signs of a bit more rancour in what is normally a somnambulant affair. The Congress began with a very downbeat address by TUC president Leslie Manasseh, deputy general secretary of the right-wing led union Prospect. Delegates were left wondering whether Corbynmania had completely passed the bureaucracy by. Once the debates began, there were numerous name checks for the new Labour leader. More importantly, a number of unions got up to oppose a Community motion calling for more social partnership...

The Guardian on 6 September tried to stir up panic by claiming that "Jon Lansman, a Corbyn supporter who acts as the spokesman for the Bennite Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD), is planning to table a motion at the party conference calling for the reintroduction of... mandatory reselection of MPs", as a plan for "weeding out MPs opposed to the hard left". The facts are as follows. In 1979 Labour conference changed the rules so that Labour MPs, once elected, did not automatically remain Labour candidates in their constituencies for life. They could be chosen election after election...

Pete Firmin Political Secretary of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), spoke to Solidarity in a personal capacity. What are the main lessons of the Corbyn campaign so far? That the existing left doesn’t have to control everything — the reason the campaign has surged is because it’s got out of control and in the positive sense. Nobody has controlled it or been able to control it top down. It’s flourished in ways nobody’s expected. That has been incredibly positive. In addition lots of people new to politics or at least Labour Party politics have come around it; there’s a big layer of...

Jeremy Corbyn will come under pressure from the Labour right and some union bureaucrats to moderate the left-wing policies he advocated during the Labour leadership campaign, some of which were more moderate than what he advocated before the leadership election. On the other hand he will come under pressure from left-wing activists and from workers in struggle to push forward a radical programme to fight austerity. Which way will things go? To some extent, pressure will decide. Socialists must raise, and educate the widest possible layers of activists in the goal of building a new society...

Some delegates at the Labour Party special conference on 12 September estimated that maybe a majority of those in the hall were unhappy about Jeremy Corbyn being elected Labour leader. Among ourselves, in Workers’ Liberty, we consider it tacky to applaud “leaders”; indeed, we have a rule banning such applause at our conferences. In the Labour Party, it is reckoned routine courtesy to give standing ovations to leaders. But many in the hall, so I’m told, could only bring themselves to clap politely. Unlike in the 1980s, we have a Labour Party where the rank and file members are on average to the...

No one predicted what would happen with Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign; all of us are fallible. But unlike Workers’ Liberty, lefty author and journalist Owen Jones admits that he did not originally want a left candidate for the Labour leadership. Jones campaigned for the soft left Wigan MP Lisa Nandy to stand. To give Jones his due, he acknowledges that it would have been absurd, once Corbyn got nominated, not to follow the logic of the fight: “Obviously the thing about history is that it doesn’t unfold in ways you can control. ‘Hey, history, tell you what, could we run this in three years instead...