Solidarity 049, 8 April 2004

Debate and discussion: Shut down the religious schools!

Martin Thomas in Solidarity Vol 3 No 48 wants to err on the side of liberty when it comes to girls wearing the veil in French schools. The issue of the veil in school is not just a French issue; one reason I want to raise it is because of the stark contrast between Britain and France on the issue. In Britain it is accepted that parents own their children, we can hit them and we can exclude them from important parts of education. Cultural relativist ideology dominates education, and there is an expansion of reactionary state funded religious schools. In France the tradition of secular state...

NUJ political fund defeat

By a London Freelance branch member The proposal for the National Union of Journalists to have a political fund has been narrowly defeated in a ballot of members: 53% voted no and 47% yes on a turnout of 28.6%. NUJ President George Macintyre commented: "The union will respect the result but will continue to campaign politically around issues that matter to members, and will hope not to face any legal challenge." The ballot fulfilled a decision of the 2003 Annual Delegate Meeting. The leadership of the union put a lot of effort into getting a yes vote, but were hampered by high profile...

Blairism, ten years on

The biggest event in working-class politics for many decades was the Blairite hijacking of the Labour Party in the mid 1990s. John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna look at the lessons. The Blairites transformed the Labour Party, which the trade unions founded over a hundred years ago, from the grossly inadequate and frequently treacherous "bourgeois workers' party" it had been into something qualitatively different. In the public pronouncements of its leaders, New Labour is an explicitly anti-working-class party. It treats the labour movement and the working class with open contempt. If New Labour did...

The Marxist policy on trade

A revolutionary alternative to both free trade and fair trade is the perspective held by the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. It is based on the core ideas of Marxists a century ago, applied to the circumstances we live in today. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels first wrote about world trade in the 1840s, when British capitalism was the dominant industrial force in the world economy and free trade had just become the commercial policy of the British government. In England the Corn Laws that had kept the price of food high (and the landowners rich) were repealed in 1846, sparking a great...

Debate and dicussion: Marxists and the workers' party

Reformism has not collapsed As far as I know, the catchphrase "Build the revolutionary party!" or "Build the party!" was first used as a regular slogan, directed at the general public, by French Trotskyists in the mid-1940s. Similar phrases will have been used by Marxists before then, as exhortations to their own activists or sympathisers, or as occasional rhetoric; but that was, I think, the first time the slogan "build the party" was offered to the public at large as instruction on what they should do to better their lot. In the 1970s the catchphrase was revived by Gerry Healy's Workers'...

Civil service: We need a national dispute!

By a Civil Servant On 13 and 14 April tens of thousands of PCS members in the DWP and the Office For National Statistics will be on strike over pay. In the last few months there has been strike action in the Treasury Solicitors, the Courts and the Home Office. In June 2003 the Treasury clamped down on pay in the civil service and decreed that no pay increase would be worth more than 3.5%. The results of this clamp down are still being played out in 2004 - all the recent strike action concerns last year's pay round!. The Treasury has made it clear that 2004 will be another year of "pay...

National dispute over rail pay?

By a RMT member Talks have broken down between the railworkers' Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union and employers Network Rail over pay, pensions and travel facilities. The RMT executive will meet soon to discuss a national ballot of the union's 7,000 Network Rail members, who include signalling, maintenance and station staff. "The company has imposed a pension scheme for new entrants that is no better than a glorified savings plan subject to the whims of the market," said RMT general secretary Bob Crow. "Their pay offer of 3% is the lowest in the rail industry, and they have refused to...

Not everyone in GMB is beaten

By Alfred Mars On the first anniversary of Blair's capture of the once mighty GMB, where are we? Kevin Curran was elected General Secretary of GMB after polling 60,000 votes from a membership ballot of 600,000. His nearest rival secured 30,000 votes. Twelve complaints into Kevin's conduct during the election have been upheld but, not surprisingly, Kevin has said no action should be taken. For many in the union, Kevin's election came as a big surprise as he had no real support from any part of the union structure. Anyone that knew him, knew he was just another ambitious bureaucrat who had...

NUT conference: No to 'remodelling'!

By Patrick Murphy, Divisional Secretary, Leeds NUT The largest teachers' union, the NUT, meets in Harrogate at a time when it is under pressure within the TUC for its insistence on the principle that only qualified teachers should teach. Apart from NUT, every union representing school-based staff has signed up to a national agreement to "remodel" the school workforce. The agreement was drawn up in January 2003 for implementation from the beginning of the 2003-4 school year and will lead to teaching assistants taking responsibility for whole classes. The other teacher unions, NASUWT and ATL...

Iraq: help build "Third Camp" against US and Sadr

By Clive Bradley The Iraq war itself was declared over last May. But in a real sense, the fighting in Iraq, which reached a new intensity this week, is the same war, still being fought. The American and British military machines won the official war quickly. But they prepared very badly for the peace. Now, there is no peace. The decision to provoke the Army of the Mahdi, the militia of radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, into open rebellion, seems typical of the incompetence of the US administration. First, they closed the newspaper of Muqtada's group; then they shot down demonstrators. By...

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