Solidarity 079, 1 September 2005

A socialist perspective on some great poems throughout history... The Prelude A favourite pleasure hath it been with me From time of earliest youth to walk alone Along the public way, when, for the night Deserted, in its silence it assumes A character of deeper quietness Than greater solitudes. At such an hour Once, ere these summer months were passed away, I slowly mounted up a steep ascent Where the road’s wat’ry surface, to the ridge Of that sharp rising, glittered in the moon And seemed before my eyes another stream Creeping with silent lapse to join the brook That murmured in the valley...

PCS in the London Department of Work and Pensions has finally resolved to ballot members for strike action over the threat of job losses. Under the Government’s plans London DWP will lose over a thousand workers and see many more transferred out of London. If the ballot, which begins on 5 September, is successful, then up to10,000 workers will take part in discontinuous strike action starting on 30 September. The union originally tried to negotiate with the employers and called for a moratorium on job losses while talks took place. However, these representations have been flatly rejected. It...

New Zealand goes to the polls on 17 September to elect a new government. A close look at the parties shows that, from a working class point of view, there remains nothing to choose from between Labour and the opposition National Party. For instance, Labour, worried by slipping support,have announced a vote-catching policy of cancelling interest on student loans. Yet the accumulated student debt of $7 billion is a result of “user pays” policies introduced by Labour in the 1980s and pursued and extended by National Party through the following decade. NZ Workers have tried, with some limited...

At the end of August 250 Eastern European workers, picking strawberries for S&A Produce at Brierley, near Leominster, organised a road blockade in protest at their dreadful pay and conditions. S&A employs 1,500 migrant workers under the UK’s seasonal agricultural workers scheme which allows Eastern Europeans to come to Britain to work for a limited period. It is a huge operation, planting more than 20 million strawberry plants every year. Workers pay “gangmasters” hundreds of pounds to come to the UK; S&A workers, no doubt fairly typically, are also liable for a variety of “charges” which mean...

Clive Bradley reviews Lost, Wednesdays, Channel Four Contemporary American television drama often has an ambition and scale which less than a decade ago would have been thought impossible, more suited for cinema — and which dwarfs anything attempted on this side of the Atlantic. Lost has both ambition and scale. A plane crashes en route from Australia to the United States, stranding its survivors on an inhabited island, where gradually they realise no rescue is coming, and that in addition to the expected difficulties of finding food and water and getting along with each other, they must deal...

A wry look at the ins-and-outs of the left... GALLOWAY FAN CLUB: MEMBERS WANTED Sadly I wasn’t able to pay £100 to attend the CPGB’s “Communist University” summerschool this year, but according to the AWL comrades who attended it was highly entertaining. Those highly principled publishers of the Weekly Worker had organised a debate with us on the general election contest in Bethnal Green and Bow as the plenary session on the Saturday afternoon of their school. Attended by almost 22 people, including several members of the Stalinist Turkish Communist Party, this session was entitled “Galloway...

A series of protests took place over the weekend in protest at the Government’s announcement that it plans to begin deporting “failed” asylum-seekers back to Iraq. Protests in Scotland, Wales and English cities with a large Iraqi population including Nottingham, Cardiff and Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham and London also highlighted the Government’s plans to cut benefits for Iraqis who do not return home, in an attempt to drive them out of the UK “voluntarily”. New Labour’s attempt to deport Iraqi asylum-seekers - many of whom are socialist political exiles from Saddam’s regime - back to a...

The article in Solidarity 3/78 (“Should socialists support gun control”) suggests that socialists should be in favour of the right for individuals to carry guns because the working class needs to be able to defend itself against both police violence on an everyday basis and against state violence during a future revolutionary situation. But supporting workers’ right to self-defence should not immediately lead us to demand that the UK should follow the US in making guns freely available to every consumer. Socialist endorsement of revolutionary violence must surely be conditional on self-defence...