Solidarity 381, 21 October 2015

Join Labour? No, vie with UKIP

The TUSC electoral coalition, mainly organised by the Socialist Party, will continue to stand candidates against Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. A member of the Labour Representation Committee (a Labour left group) reports: “It was confirmed to us that TUSC would be standing candidates... in the coming local elections in May 2016. They also said they would oppose trade unions re-affiliating to the Labour Party, and were against re-joining the Labour Party”. The Socialist Party’s line is that TUSC should contest council seats, wherever they are able, unless the Labour candidate commits...

The Ice-pick again?

According to Stephen Bush in the New Statesman, the Labour Party machine’s spate of expulsions and bannings in the run-up to the leadership election which Jeremy Corbyn won was talked about as “Operation Ice-pick”. The name echoes the sick in-jokes popular among leaders of the Labour student organisation in the 1970s and 80s; they admired the Stalinist assassin who used an ice-pick to kill Leon Trotsky in 1940. Bush reported that “Twitter [was] ablaze with activists who believe they have been kicked out because they are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn”. The purge was not systematic. According to...

­­Government to victimise more

I submitted a subject access request last year to the University of Birmingham, where I studied, for all data containing my name. It came back with correspondence between Peter Clarke, retired head of Counter Terrorism Command in the London Met, and lead officer on the Trojan Horse investigation in Birmingham, my university management and West Midlands police, all identifying me in a video of a student protest in London from 2013. This is a protest where I was not arrested, let alone charged. My only previous interaction with police had been when I had given my name following a protest against...

On the streets for the right to strike

The Tories plan to drop the section of the Trade Union Bill that would require trade unions to give two weeks notice to the police of any material they plan to post on social media as part of a strike. The social media rules, heavily criticised and entirely unworkable, were always likely to be the section of the Bill to be dropped in order to win over Tories, like David Davies MP, who thought this was “going a bit far”. However, the rest of the bill, as it reaches the end of committee stages in the House of Commons, remains largely intact. The worst attack on workers’ rights since Thatcher′s...

Abolish Israel? How, and then what?

In Socialist Worker of the 17 October, Nick Clark turns his attention to the new wave of violence in Israel-Palestine. Clark writes about the indignity and oppression suffered by the Palestinians forced from their homes in East Jerusalem, starved and bombed in Gaza, harassed and driven off their land in the West Bank. He argues, correctly, that the violence has to be seen in this context. He notes that there is currently little sign of the Israeli government tolerating the setting up of a Palestinian state. But, in a clumsy non sequitur, he then argues that this means that the “vision of a...

A new kind of uniformity

The attack by Class War on the Cereal Killer shop in Shoreditch has been rightly condemned as self-indulgent, misguided and ineffective in articles by Gemma Short and Martin Thomas in Solidarity . Martin has gone further by writing — under the heading “The enemy is capital!” — to give a generally favourable view of gentrification in its impact on working-class communities in London. Where it causes their displacement, it can be resisted, he glibly asserts. Some of the effects of the movement of better off people into an area can indeed be positive. But alongside these there are necessarily...

Attacks in Turkey target solidarity and unity

On 10 October, two bomb blasts officially killed 97 people in the Turkish capital, Ankara. The had gathered for “Labour, Democracy, and Peace Rally” to protest the resumption of war between the Turkish state and Kurdish militants, mainly in Turkish Kurdistan. The deadly atrocity, which fundamentally targeted the rapprochement and unity of the Kurdish people, Alevis, leftist and progressive social groups in Turkey, was no surprise. The attacks can be seen as the continuation of a political process which commenced with the overturning of peace process between the state and the Kurdistan Worker’s...

“We are Raif” campaign for Saudi human rights

For many decades the relationship between the Saudi Wahhabist dictatorship and the arms, oil and other companies in Britain has been ignored by the media. Despite Bin Laden’s wealthy Saudi family background. Despite the majority of the 9/11 bombers being Saudi. Despite the Saudi Arabia’s brutal treatment of women and migrant workers. Despite Saudi having been second only to Iran in numbers of executions per head of population (this year it’s likely to overtake Iran). Despite too, having a legal system run by religious reactionaries who execute people for being gay, an atheist, for fighting...

School students will not be silenced!

Students at my school, King Edward’s Camp Hill School For Girls, Birmingham, were recently intimidated for protesting at the conditions under which a visit by the Israeli deputy ambassador took place. Students who spoke against the visit, and against the process itself, were pulled out of lessons, and there have been notices throughout school about their use of social media. A student has been deliberately singled out for having written a statement against it. This is silencing, this is an exercise of authority. Students voicing an opinion, and that opinion being shared widely, is not. The...

Russia backs Assad's new offensive

The Russian military intervention has had its intended effect of strengthening the Syrian Army, enabling it to start a major offensive in the north east of the country. Both Aleppo and the valley of Orontes, previously strongholds of Jabhat al-Nusra, are now under sustained attack by the Syrian military with the support of Russian airstrikes. Russia’s air war is being guided by Damascus. Independent reporter Robert Fisk claims Russia receives up to 800 coordinates a night for targeted airstrikes. These co-ordinates are being shared with Turkey, and Fisk reports a communications system now...

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