Solidarity 411, 8 July 2016

Osborne drops his “virtue”

“Having already broken two of his self-imposed fiscal rules”, reported the Financial Times on 1 July, chancellor George “Osborne indicated on Friday [1st] that he would activate the get-out clause on his third and final rule. “At the Budget in March, Mr Osborne admitted he would fail to meet his promise to cut debt as a share of gross domestic product this year. Last year he rowed back on his cap on welfare spending”. Now he has dropped his promise to put the government budget in surplus by 2020. The rules were only ever shams designed to help the Tories pretend that their social cuts are not...

Discontent over Brexit

On Saturday 2 July, tens of thousands came to London to demonstrate against Britain leaving Europe. There were people of all ages on the march and, while many had come from outside London, the majority were probably what the right-wing press like to call London’s “metropolitan elite”. The political flavour of the march was very “liberal” and far from socialist. It was reminiscent of the pro-EU marches that take place in Eastern European countries like Hungary or Ukraine whose population is split between pro- and anti-EU camps. Revolutionary socialists were a very small minority on the march...

Two more police killings

Two more black men have been fatally shot by the police in two different US states. Alton Sterling was shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Tuesday 5 July. Alton was selling CDs and DVDs outside a convenience store when police responded to a 911 call reporting a ″black man with a gun″. Alton was tasered, pinned to the ground, and then shot at least five times. Video footage of the shooting quickly circulated on social media, which clearly shows Alton being pinned to the ground by two officers before one officer draws his gun and shoots. A second video, shows officers removing a gun from Alton′s...

Junior doctors reject deal

Six in ten junior doctors have voted to reject the re-negotiated contract offered by the government. In a referendum run by the British Medical Association (BMA), 58% voted to reject the contract on a turnout of 68%. It is clear that many junior doctors do not think this contract is a sufficient improvement on the old one, and that it will do significant harm to the medical profession and the NHS. However many who voted to accept the contract also have serious concerns. We must now win them over, and galvanise their support. Yesterday Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt announced that implementation...

Mental health care is a right

Last year, 2015, 61% of under-18s referred to local mental health services (CAMHS) got no treatment. A third didn’t even get assessed. In some areas, as few as 20% of those referred got treatment. Those figures come from the most recent NHS statistics. Previous figures have shown that even those who get treatment often have to wait six months or longer to get it. NHS boss Simon Stevens says that at present the NHS is “able to respond to perhaps one in four children who might be defined as having a mental health need”. The rich should be taxed heavily to rebuild the NHS, starting with this...

Australia: votes scatter

Australia’s federal election on 2 July looks like producing a hung parliament. The full results, with all the transfers due under the Alternative Vote system (for the House of Reps) and PR (for the Senate), will not be in for weeks, but it looks like the Liberal-National coalition has lost the (big) majority they won in the House of Reps in 2013, and lost ground in the Senate too. Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called the election in the hope of winning enough seats in the Senate to push through legislation like the reintroduction of the ABCC, a special policing and judicial agency...

French left attempt censure of government

At 3.45 p.m. on Wednesday 6 July, deputies on the left wing of the National Assembly (socialists, communists, ecologists not part of the government and non-party deputies) decided to issue a motion of censure of the government. The motion opposed the forced adoption of the labour law by means of article 49-3 [which allows the French President to turn a vote on any law into a vote of confidence in the government]; however they were only able to collect 56 out of the required 58 signatures. The motion could not be put, [Premier] Valls’s constitutional blackmail succeeded, and one chapter of this...

Campaign for Corbyn and socialist policies! Rebuild the labour movement!

(Updated 9am Friday 14 July) We have won the latest round of the battle to stop Corbyn from being ousted and Labour's leader, and his supporters from being driven out of the Party. On Tuesday 12 July Labour's National Executive Committee agreed by 18-14 votes that Corbyn will automatically be on the ballot in the challenge to his leadership. A campaign of political pressure, petitioning, rallying and debate has ensured support for democratic process won out in the vote on Tuesday. The previous day former Shadow Cabinet member, Angela Eagle, had triggered a leadership contest, putting herself...

The Last Time the Labour MPs Revolted Against Party Democracy

At its Scarborough conference in 1960, the Labour Party voted in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. This decision had tremendous implications for British politics, for it opened a fundamental breach in Labour-Tory foreign and 'defence' policy bipartisanship, one of the pillars on which class collaboration rests and on which depends the possibility of orderly changes in party government at Westminster. British unilateral nuclear disarmament implied the disruption of NATO and probably British withdrawal from the western military alliances all of which relied on nuclear weapons...

An Irish Soldier Who Died in the Battle of the Somme, July 1916

“The trenches in France are healthier than the slums of Dublin”! -British army recruiting poster,1916 The big, framed, multi-coloured certificate on our wall in Ennis, in the West of Ireland, puzzled me for a long time when I was very small. To the right of the fireplace, near the picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (in which Jesus Christ wore his wounded, thorn-bound, bleeding heart outside his shirt) it was decorated at the top by a semi-circle of little flags of different sorts. The inscription was what I could not make sense of. It testified that John O'Mahony "had given his life" in July...

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