Solidarity 034, 10 July 2003

The 1983 Heresy Hunt: 3

This is article three in the four part series as originally published in 2003. For an edited version of all four articles click here Heresy Hunted 1 Heresy Hunted 2 Heresy Hunted 3 Heresy Hunted 4 Sean Matgamna continues his article on "the last time we were heresy-hunted" with a survey of the labour movement organisations and individuals who backed the campaign against Socialist Organiser (forerunner of Solidarity) in 1983 by the Workers Revolutionary Party, then a high-profile, pseudo-Trotskyist organisation with a daily paper with some influence in the labour movement, Newsline. In 1981...

Hants firefighters

Firefighters win Home Office appeal - more await justice By Vicki Morris Four Basingstoke firefighters have won their Home Office appeal against their sacking on charges of bullying. The four - Barry Kearley, Steve Dunbar, Bernie Ross and Dick Thoroughgood - suspended from duty in 1999, and sacked thereafter, have spent over four years trying to prove their innocence and get their jobs back. It remains to be seen whether their employers Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service (HFRS) will now reinstate them. There were three more victims of management in Basingstoke, FBU officials Simon Green, Steve...

Writing on the Wall: Comical Ali's Spin

In solidarity with our favourite spinmeister, and in protest at his appalling treatment at the hands of the Beeb, Solidarity has given over this column to Comical Ali Campbell to give his spin on the latest News. Majority of old people not in poverty A national survey, conducted on behalf of the ESRC (the Economic and Social Research Council) by the University of Keele, highlighted a range of goods and services deemed necessary for comfortable daily living. People lacking two or more items because they could not afford them were judged to be in poverty. Overall, only 45% of the elderly people...

World shorts

Protest in Hong Kong against anti-subversion law Around 50,000 people took part in a sit-in last week against the Hong Kong government’s controversial anti-subversion bill. The protest followed the 1 July demonstration when more than 500,000 workers and trade unionists marched to denounce the bill—the biggest protest in China since the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989. The protests have forced chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, who was imposed by the Chinese government, to make some concessions and postpone the second reading of the bill in the territory’s ruling Legislative Council. Under...

Workers History: From Tolpuddle to Liaoyang

by Oona Swann The workers’ fight goes on “In the year 1831-32, there was a general movement of the working classes for an increase of wages, and the labouring men in the parish where I lived [Tolpuddle] gathered together, and met their employers, to ask them for an advance of wages, and they came to a mutual agreement, the masters in Tolpuddle promising to give the men as much for their labour as the other masters in the district… Shortly after we learnt that, in almost every place around us, the masters were giving their men money, or money’s worth to the amount of ten shillings a week — we...

T&G: Winds of change

By Sue Denham The Branch Delegate Conference of the T&G was on the surface a boring affair. No dramatic conference arguments; composites were passed in almost every case with GEC endorsement. Excellent positions on asylum seekers and the organisation of migrant workers, no hint of a right-wing agenda. Affiliation to the United Campaign for the Repeal of the Anti-Trade Union Laws (UCRATUL) went through with GEC recommendation and was passed as part of a comprehensive composite on anti-trades union legislation. On the Labour Party the BDC unanimously voted to hold NEC and conference delegates to...

SWP swoops on Birmingham

By David Stamp, independent member of Birmingham Socialist Alliance Whatever future the Socialist Alliance may have — and I’m no longer sure it even has one — it’s going to be an uphill struggle to recapture anything approaching a spirit of trust or unity within the Birmingham left following the antics on 1 July. In a piece of electoral manipulation that would shame Dame Shirley Porter, the SWP managed to “pack” an AGM of the local Alliance with a tribe of clones, for no other reason than to oust Steve Godward, the sitting chair, along with anyone else on the executive brave or foolish enough...

Support Iranian Workers

From Workers' Left Unity-Iran Over the last few weeks, the demonstrations and sit-ins organised by textile workers in Behshahr in northern Iran have come to symbolise the long struggle of the Iranian workers for the right to a decent wage, the right to work. Having operated for more than 60 years, Behshahr Chit Sazi is one of the oldest textile factories of Iran, once employing more than 3,000 workers. However, following years of mismanagement and, more recently, privatisation, this factory, like most other textile plants in Iran, has sacked the majority of its workforce. Those still employed...

Something new in Middle East

Mark Osborn’s “alternative analysis” (Solidarity 3/32) of the Middle East “roadmap” misses all the important points. He does, however, give the reader fair warning, right at the start, with his series of dogmatic assertions, that that is what he is likely to do. The editorial (Solidarity 3/31) attempted to analyse and report on the document (“the roadmap”) and assess what may be new in the situation registered in the document and in the unwonted American postures behind it. The “alternative analysis” starts from dogmatic assumptions, indeed from one great a priori assumption: that the “roadmap...

Socialist Alliance at the crossroads

The Socialist Alliance can either continue on the road of class struggle working class politics, that is, on the course Solidarity and Workers' Liberty, together with others - not then the Socialist Workers' Party - set for it four years ago.Or it can adopt the cross-class popular frontist politics which the biggest organisation in the SA now, the SWP, advocates. The signs, unfortunately, are that it will go the way the SWP wants it to go. They have a built-in majority. In the last few months they have used that majority to take control of the Executive and to remove non-SWPers from positions...

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