Solidarity 067, 17 February 2005

Firefighters at Glasgow Airport, TGWU members, have been on indefinite strike action since 29 January. The strike is over BAA’s plans to remove the current fire fighting service in the “land side” areas of the operation. The TGWU say this will jeopardise safety at the airport. BAA proposes to replace the current fire fighting teams with new “Fire Safety Teams” who will not be allowed under law, to engage in fire-fighting or rescue. There will no longer be fire-fighting capabilities on-site at the airports. They will rely on local authority fire-fighters to provide the service in the terminals...

When 1,000 Catholics in the Short Strand area of East Belfast march against the IRA, when "IRA scum out" is painted on walls by local people, things have begun to change in Northern Ireland. The Short Strand is a Catholic enclave surrounded by a Protestant population from which it is separated by a high metal fence. There can be few places in Northern Ireland in which the Catholics feel as vulnerable and under threat as in the Short Strand. It is, therefore, an area in which the IRA’s role as protector of Catholics has had a serous and urgent meaning. Yet, the stabbing of Robert McCartney in a...

While articles in Solidarity 64 and 65 on the politics behind tsunami aid and recovery have addressed general issues concerning the stinginess of western governments to give, and the inept and corrupt agencies on the ground in affected areas, a number of key political issues have escaped attention. As reported in Solidarity, the Australian government has led other western governments in “giving” million. Yet almost every cent given to recipient countries will benefit Australian business in some way. This “tied aid” ensures that recipient countries must purchase goods and services from donor...

Left-wing candidate Christine Blower has been elected as Deputy General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers. She defeated the more right-wing candidate, John Bangs, by just under 5,000 votes. Bangs was the candidate of the Broadly Speaking group (formerly the Broad Left); Christine was supported by the Campaign for a Democratic and Fighting Union (CDFU) and the Socialist Teachers’ Alliance (STA). She had previously been elected President of the Union and is secretary of the Hammersmith and Fulham division. She was also a prominent member of the Socialist Alliance. Though heavily...

Hassan Juma’a, President of the General Union of Oil Employees in Basra, spoke in London on 8 February and answered questions. The meeting was organised by Iraq Occupation Focus, and the interpreter was Sami Ramadani. The Americans’ greed in occupying Iraq is very well known and very clear to all. In 1975 Henry Kissinger outlined US policy in the Middle East in a book. He stressed that the USA should control Middle East oil, and that, we believe, is the main reason why Iraq was invaded and occupied. The former ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was working as though he was an official of the State...

Although Eric Lee’s discussion article on Menshevism (printed on page 8 of Solidarity 3/66 but due to a human/machine error not attributed to him), raised some important points of which revolutionary socialists should take note, its basic line was factually wrong and politically disorienting. First, Eric blames the Bolsheviks for the rise of Stalinism, citing repression carried out by the Soviet government soon after October 1917. What he fails to examine is the difference between authoritarian measures — many of which were indisputably excessive, wrong-headed and even in some cases criminally...

Sacha Ismail and Peter Tatchell debate the issues Sacha Ismail Most of those present at the London AWL forum on 20 January will have agreed with much of speaker Peter Tatchell’s diagnosis of “What’s wrong with the left” (see transcript Solidarity 3/66) — that, increasingly, most self-styled revolutionary socialists substitute an entirely negative, classless “anti-imperialism” for the positive criteria of working-class struggle and consistent democracy. More controversial was Tatchell’s proposed solution for the moral collapse of the left. He advocates that socialists do as he has done and join...

Dave Morris and Helen Steel, aka the McLibel 2, won another round in their battle against the McDonald’s burger chain at the European Court on Tuesday 15 February. Helen and Dave fought a 313-day court battle against McDonald’s to defend themselves against a libel charge brought by the multinational. The pair – low-waged working class people – had distributed a London Greenpeace leaflet in 1990 titled ‘What’s Wrong with McDonald’s?’. The leaflet accused McDonald’s of exploiting children, paying poverty wages and destroying the rainforest. McDonald’s responded by dragging them to court in an...

by Sean Matgamna “The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable” was how Oscar Wilde famously described fox-hunting. The unspeakable in full and ridiculous pursuit of the unteachable, describes the strange spectacle of the racist press and the racist Tory Party howling in pursuit of Mayor Ken Livingstone for comparing Evening Standard reporter Oliver Finegold, who happens to be Jewish, to a Nazi concentration camp guard. The Tories and their press set the pace in a vile competition with the Blair government to see which of them can do more to whip up hostility against immigrants and asylum...

Dan Nichols reviews “blood on our hands: the english civil war”, Channel 4 Channel Four’s programme on the English Revolution broke new ground in its portrayal of a nation at war with itself. It was based around letters from the period and featured actors playing the roles of those who had written the letters. The programme’s approach certainly had an impact. It brought home just how destructive the conflict was and how much people suffered. It also highlighted the role that “foreign fighters” from North America played in the conflict. A lot of Puritan settlers apparently returned to their...