Solidarity 519, 2 October 2019

See accompanying reports from Labour conference in the same Solidarity Labour must respect free movement vote Labour members and trade unionists have called on party leaders to implement the radical migrants’ rights policy adopted by a landslide vote at last week’s party conference. The resolution, written by the Labour Campaign for Free Movement (LCFM), represents possibly the most dramatic leap leftwards on immigration in the party’s history. But just a day after the vote, Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott contradicted it, telling Radio 4 that in renegotiating Brexit, a Labour government...

Workers’ Liberty comrades and those around us had a huge impact on Labour Party conference this year (21-25 September, Brighton). When the Leader’s Office was fishing for compromises on Brexit in the run up to conference, some prominent Remainers were arguing that we’d already won everything we wanted, and that it was reasonable for Labour not to argue explicitly for Remain. It was at the Labour for a Socialist Europe steering committee that was all put to bed. Following that, the AEIP/L4SE campaign was clear all the way through conference: we were going to refuse to accept being swallowed...

The Maoist regime began not in 1949, with the declaration of the People’s Republic of China, but twenty years earlier, with the defeat of the Chinese working class movement at the hands of Chiang Kai Shek. Masses of communist workers were slaughtered by the White Terror. After the Canton uprising of December 1927, the Chinese working class remained prostrate under the heel of Chiang. But it was still alive and capable of reviving – at least until the full-scale Japanese invasion of 1937 crushed political life in the cities. What happened to the Chinese working class was partly determined by...

Six months ago now a debate was sparked by comments made by Eddie Dempsey, an activist for “full Brexit” and in the rail union RMT, at a “Full Brexit” rally on 26 March. Dempsey said that “people that turn up for those Tommy Robinson demos or any other march like that – the one thing that unites those people, whatever other bigotry is going on, is their hatred of the liberal left and they are right to hate them ” (emphasis added). He further commented that “too many in the Labour Party have made a calculation that there’s a certain section at the top end of the working class, in alliance with...

One crucial aspect of Brexit, the impact on the Irish (or, rather, British-Irish) Border, was comprehensively ignored in the British media during the 2016 referendum campaign itself. It is fitting, then, that it has threatened to unravel the whole Brexit process, in the form of the “backstop”, a set of guarantees against the imposition of a hard border which have been written into the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and the EU. The flipside of that fact is that Johnson’s drive for a “no deal” Brexit, if it succeeds, will mean in effect a new partition of Ireland, a reversal of the slow...

Who could have missed Ayman Odeh’s eloquent op-ed piece in the New York Times , where he rightly asserted that “Arab Palestinian citizens have chosen to reject Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his politics of fear and hate, and the inequality and division he advanced for the past decade”? Or his explanation of why he and the coalition he leads chose to nominate Benny Gantz — an IDF chief accused of war crimes against fellow Palestinians — for prime minister. It was on this promise, and with the full knowledge that the Joint List will never be part of the emerging future ruling coalition...

First I want to thank Martin Thomas for his “more sceptical assessment” of the work of György Lukács ( Solidarity 518). This is precisely what is needed. In the same vein my thanks also to all those who attended the session on Lukács at Ideas for Freedom 2019 recently and gave me the benefit of their thoughts and criticisms. These comments will no doubt find their way into the book I am currently writing on Lukács (excuse the plug!). I don’t feel able at the moment to render a fully detailed response to Martin’s comments, so what follows will no doubt appear rather haphazard in response. The...

Couriers working for eCourier, a Royal Mail Group subsidiary, will strike on 10 and 11 October. IWGB — the union they and I are in — demands the couriers be put on worker contracts, be paid the London Living Wage after costs and that the company enter into a collective bargaining agreement with the union. For years, eCourier — like Deliveroo and many other courier companies — has been unlawfully classifying pushbike, motorbike and van couriers as independent contractors, denying them their most basic employment rights, including the right to a guaranteed minimum wage and the right to holiday...

London Underground station workers at the east end of the District Line began industrial action from Friday 27 September, in a dispute over workplace safety. Workers will refuse to detrain or attend incidents alone, and will work from a place of safety, after their union, RMT, launched a campaign to demand safe staffing levels following a spike in antisocial behaviour and staff assaults. Workplace safety is becoming an increasingly acute issue on the Tube, after a serious assault on staff at West Ham station. Drivers in the RMT on four lines — Victoria, Central, Northern, and Jubilee — will...

Donald Trump is such an obvious crook that he’s been a prime candidate for impeachment from the minute he assumed office. There has been such a substantial menu of grounds for impeachment that it’s difficult to know what to choose. Soliciting help from Putin’s secret services to win the election itself? Illegal election payments to porn stars? Trump’s various businesses benefiting from his presidency? As of last week, there were 30 separate investigations into Trump being conducted by Congressional, Federal or State authorities. The problem so far has been that none of the accusations have...