Solidarity 109, 5 April 2007

By Sofie Buckland, NUS national executive One of the Darfuris faced with deportation is Sadiq Abakar, who has spent over seven years in Britain in Britain awaiting asylum. He fled Sudan in 1999 after he and his brother were jailed for anti-government protests; his brother was later killed in prison, and his father and other family members have also been murdered. He spent 35 days in a cargo container to get here, only to face years of harrassment from immigration officials once he arrived. He now has a young family. Sadiq learnt English at Lambeth College in south London and became a leading...

By Paul Hampton The recent teachers’ struggle in Iran is the latest visible sign of an independent labour movement emerging after 25 years of repression. This movement holds out the greatest hope — both for getting rid of the theocratic regime and winning some kind of democratic republic – but also for averting a terrible war in the region. A new book, Iran on the brink, by Swedish journalists Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian chronicles the rise of a new independent workers’ movement in Iran. * The movement has grown despite the fact that independent unions are outlawed and strikes illegal...

By colin foster The rumour now is that Tony Blair will stand down as leader on around 9 May. There will then only be a few days for candidates to collect the 45 nominations from Labour MPs necessary to get on the ballot paper for the new Labour leader; three weeks for further campaigning; and two weeks for the actual ballot. So time is short now for the drive to promote rebel Labour MP John McDonnell as a left-wing candidate. Supporters will be active at two major union conferences between now and 9 May, the Unison health sector conference on 22-24 April and the National Union of Teachers...

Dear comrades, Do you support John McDonnell’s campaign against Gordon Brown for the Labour Party leadership? When John McDonnell declared himself a candidate for Labour leader to succeed Tony Blair, you wrote: “McDonnell is the Labour MP with the most consistent record of voting against New Labour’s anti-working class policies. Potentially a McDonnell leadership challenge could play a role in raising the profile of socialist ideas amongst sections of working-class people”. (Hannah Sell, The Socialist, 27/07/06). Seven months on, there can be no doubt that the “potential” has become a reality...

By Keir Lawson, Glasgow SSP and Scottish Socialist Youth student organiser The Scottish Socialist Party is currently in the midst of campaigning for both councillors and MSPs in the upcoming Scottish elections. Unlike Tommy Sheridan’s Solidarity, the SSP is standing on an explicitly socialist platform, while emphasising our key demands of free public transport for all, scrapping the council tax and opposition to the occupation of Iraq. The SSP has recovered a lot of lost ground, with the most recent national poll putting the party on 5%; retaining all our current MSPs and gaining a handful of...

By Rhodri Evans Australia’s Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) has announced its intention to affiliate to the Australian Labor Party. The leadership of the union — which organises federal and state government workers — asserts that they are affiliating in order to use the union’s vote within the ALP to make sure that Labor scraps the current conservative government’s anti-union WorkChoices legislation. That is good. To make it reality, the union leadership will have to persuade the different sections of the union — which is, for most purposes, a loose federation — to affiliate to the...

By Maria Exall, CWU executive THE CWU Telecoms Executive has made an agreement with BT Global, the division of BT that deals with contracts for businesses, that means In the future BT will be able to outsource UK work to India with the acquiescence of the union. It is recommending members vote yes to this agreement. The agreement that has been done at national level is currently out to a ballot of 6,000 BT Global CWU members. Several branches are opposing the deal though the Executive has done the hard sell, not backed however by hard evidence. Many of the meetings with members to tell them...

By Pat Murphy, NUT executive THE National Union of Teachers Annual Conference takes place in Harrogate over the Easter weekend. Those who only pay attention to this union only once a year may find the experience a very odd one. The media have come to expect guaranteed noise and division at the largest teachers’ union conference but, if that is how they define newsworthy, they are unlikely to be satisfied this year. Internal unity in the NUT is at an all-time peak and there are few parts of the agenda where fierce division and debate can be expected. Partly this is because the left has no more...

PCS members at the Passport Service held a one day strike on 2 April against the below-inflation 1.9% pay offer from Gordon Brown. An estimated 20,000 PCS members in UKPS and Ministry of Defence civilian workers took part in the action, with other PCS members taking full lunch and rest breaks and not taking on work to do with striking departments in solidarity. PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said “Battered by massive job cuts and privatisation, dedicated staff across the civil service have become increasingly angry about the government using their pay as an anti-inflationary measure.” PCS...

FE lecturers in colleges across Northern Ireland were out on strike across the area on 28 March. UCU members at 15 colleges across the area were out to fight for parity between teachers' and lecturers' pay. Currently, FE lecturers earn on average £3.000 per year less than their colleagues in secondary education. The UCU warns of futher action by lecturers if the problem is not resolved.