Solidarity 580, 3 February 2021

According to a Panelbase opinion poll recently published by the Sunday Times, support for Scottish independence now stands at 49%, with 44% against and 7% undecided. Subtract the undecided, and it's 52% for and 48% against. Attitudes towards the holding of a second referendum on Scottish independence at some point in the next five years are virtually identical: 50% for, 43% against, and 7% undecided. The poll’s findings were not a blip. Prior to the 2014 referendum, support for independence had consistently hovered between 20% and 25%. But by the day of the referendum itself, support for...

Prosecuting Trump (Part of an ongoing debate: see here for all the contributions) For Joe Biden and his cabinet it’s all about “getting back to normal”. They regard the Trump presidency as an aberration, and now Washington politics can return to the old ways of wheeler dealing and horse trading between the two traditional parties of American capitalism. Yet such wishful thinking flies in the face of the attempted insurrection of 6 January and socialists who once dismissed the notion that what passes for a democracy in America is fragile need to reconsider that stance. The Biden administration...

The 30 January Emergency General Meeting of the Campaign for Socialism (CfS — Scottish Momentum) agreed to support Monica Lennon for elected leader of the Scottish Labour Party. The ballot runs from 9 to 26 February. Lennon is not a member of the CfS and has not sought its support. Nor is Lennon overly left-wing. Lennon was first elected to the Scottish Parliament in 2016, having previously been a councillor in South Lanarkshire. She backed Richard Leonard in the 2017 leadership contest and led the campaign against period poverty which led to Holyrood legislating for free period products. In...

The main characters in It’s A Sin (Channel Four), Russell T Davies’ five-part drama about the AIDS crisis in Britain through the eighties into the early nineties, are roughly my age. It describes, therefore, an experience I lived through (minor spoilers here). I remember vividly the first rumours of a disease killing gay men in America, the first time I heard the term "AIDS" (I was sitting in a freezing cold kitchen in Manchester). I remember the growing sense of dread; I remember - this must have been in 1984 - calculating (god knows on the basis of what) that I had a 1/50 chance of dying as...

Many in the Abolitionist movement to destroy US slavery were originally pacifists, militantly anti-slavery but hoping to convince slaveowners to abandon the institution. Many of the growing number of black Americans who joined the movement opposed such ideas, and events would severely test even those Abolitionists most committed to non-violence. When the Civil War finally came in 1861, the vast majority backed the Northern war effort. Abolitionist leader John Brown, the subject of recent seven-part TV series The Good Lord Bird , was frankly opposed to non-violence. He devoted himself to...

Part of an ongoing debate: see here for all the contributions US democracy is in its greatest crisis since the civil war of the 1860s. The depth and seriousness of that crisis was demonstrated by President Trump’s clumsy, many pronged attempts at a “constitutional” coup d’état against those who voted him out of office in November 2020, climaxing in the insurrectionist invasion of the Congress building on 6 January by an armed mob chanting “Hang Pence” (that is, Trump’s out-of-step vice-president), forcing legislators to hide in fear of their lives, It is a crisis rooted in the shambolic and...

“Our history is littered with examples of initiatives sold as being necessary to fight extremism that quickly devolve into tools used for the mass violation of the human and civil rights of the American people”, write Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and nine other representatives, opposing the call from leaders of both US political parties for expanded “national security” powers in response to the 6 January far-right attack on Congress. "We firmly believe", they say, "that the national security and surveillance powers of the U.S. government are already too broad, undefined, and...

The first part of this article ( Solidarity 579 ) looked at the recent rash of internet censorship. Much of this has been directed at the right, as we saw with Trump’s removal from Twitter and Facebook, though there have been some attacks on the left. This second part will examine why social media platforms have become seedbeds for the right. Because social media relies on user-generated and third-party content, it has become not only a forum for discussion but the medium through which other media, including the news, is now seen. In the UK 75% of people get some of their news via television...

There is a division in the US left between doubling down on an electoral orientation, essentially to the Democrats, and those who want to focus on the harder but more fruitful task of building up the grassroots labour movement. We’re in a better position than under Obama. At that time the entirety of the unions and the entirety of the NGO-type “left” put complete faith in Obama to bring about “change”. We’ve progressed to some extent in that there’s now a much more significant layer of people who want to exert pressure for left-wing demands. Nonetheless the bulk of the unions and the NGO world...

Cuban artists protest at the Ministry of Culture in Havana, November 2020 Distracted by the USA’s Capitol’s storming, readers may have overlooked another, more serious “attempted coup”. “[T]he US establishment is attempting to carry out a ‘soft coup’ in Cuba”, say some — and the San Isidro Movement (MSI) artists’ collective is to the fore. The rapper whose arrest sparked the movement videoed a police officer serving him summons while “swearing at the officer and declaring in English ‘Trump 2020, Trump is my President!’ He was subsequently arrested and on 12 November was sentenced to eight...