Solidarity 452, 25 October 2017

“Anyone who thinks [Donald Trump] has dropped his vow to rip up the global trading system has not been paying attention”, wrote Edward Luce in the Financial Times (18 October), after the fourth round of US-Mexican-Canadian talks on Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement, closed on 17 October. The Mexican and Canadian governments were aghast at the US negotiators’ manner, and their push for arbitrary changes which would destabilise the agreement which dates back to 1994. There will now be a lull: a fifth round of talks on 17-21 November, and then another in early 2018. Peter Navarro...

I agree with the front page and the vast majority of the editorial "Stop Brexit" ( Solidarity 451). However, I disagree that revolutionary socialists should advocate a second referendum. Unlike the situation with the first referendum, I don’t think we should necessarily oppose others who call for a referendum or oppose a referendum if it is called, but we ill serve our politics by championing the demand. As the editorial recognises, referenda are “a poor form of democracy”. In a second referendum our politics: for a workers’ Europe, more democracy within the EU and a levelling up of benefits...

Youth mental health, particularly among young teenage girls, has been in the media recently as reports and statistics surrounding the rates of self-harm and rate of delay in treatment for mental health issues have emerged. Mental health has been gaining an increasing profile as a topic of importance as schools, health care systems, parents, communities, and politicians are all calling for higher degree of support, care, and responsive treatment. While some of the issue lies with understaffed health systems which are under enormous pressure, other contributing factors can be found closer to...

In January 2016, the House of Commons Women’s and Equalities Committee produced a report on Transgender Equality which highlighted the outdatedness of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act (GRA). In July 2017, the government announced a consultation on specific proposals on the GRA; this will be launched this autumn. The GRA made it possible for people over 18 to be legally recognised as members of the sex appropriate to their gender identity as long as they could show that they suffered from gender dysphoria (distress caused by the mismatching of gender identity to sex and gender assigned at birth)...

In the first week of September, the Wakefield Academy Trust (WCAT) announced that they were no longer able “to facilitate the rapid improvement our schools need and our students deserve”. Just two days into a new school term WCAT was declaring its own dissolution and abandoning its 21 schools. But missing from the public statement or the letter to parents was any promise to return the millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money poured into the Trust since it was established in 2013. In November 2016, the press leaked a DfE report which found 16 breaches of academy finance rules by WCAT. These...

Twenty-six days after a general election, and on the eve of the Labour Day holiday weekend, (21-23 October) Aotearoa (New Zealand) has a new Labour-led coalition government. New Zealand’s Labour Day public holiday was celebrated for the first time in 1900. The Liberal government of the day offered the new public holiday instead of acceding to labour movement demands for a lawful eight-hour working day. It is poignant that it was this weekend when we learned our wish to be rid of the outgoing National (Tory) government meant swallowing the rat of a coalition government with the nationalist New...

In the end, just one Tory MP, Sarah Wollaston, the Chair of the Health Select Committee who has rebelled on a number of issues in the past, including Europe and Syria, defied the whips and voted with Labour when it came to the motion put down for an Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons calling upon the Government to pause the roll-out across the countryof its controversial new benefit Universal Credit, rather than abstaining as she and her colleagues had been instructed to do by them, but despite ministers pointing out the non-binding nature of the 299-0 result, political problems for...