Solidarity 129, 20 March 2008

The Cambridge Primary Review - arguably the most important review since Plowden in 1967 - calls for an end to national testing and a complete re-think of current primary practice. The evidence shows: • limited gains in reading skills at the expense of pupils’ enjoyment of reading; • increases in test-induced stress among pupils; a narrowing of the primary curriculum in response to the perceived pressure of testing; • the limited impact of the national strategies on both reading standards and the quality of classroom discourse on which higher-order learning depends; • a much bigger gap between...

Middle class producers at the BBC have conveniently rediscovered the working class in order to make a series that attempts to drive a wedge between workers. The vile advert designed to build some hype around the “White” series depicted a bulldog man’s face being progressively blacked out by foreign words. Is the white working-class becoming invisible? If it is, suggests the BBC, it is because of that thing “multi-culturalism”? Or perhaps it’s immigration? What’s the difference anyway? The series opened with a documentary minuting the death-whimpers of a working-man’s club in white-only Wibsey...

The American sheet music publishing industry produced a lot of ragtime music. By 1912, the sheet music industry had published three popular blues-like compositions, precipitating the Tin Pan Alley adoption of blues elements: Baby Seals’ Blues by “Baby” F. Seals (arranged by Artie Matthews), Dallas Blues by Hart Wand, and Memphis Blues by W. C. Handy. Handy used his formal training as a musician, composer and arranger to popularize the blues by transcribing and orchestrating blues in an almost symphonic style, with bands and singers. He became a popular and prolific composer, and billed himself...

The editorial on the crisis in Gaza in Solidarity 3-128 seemed to have some faith in the Israeli government’s ability to bring about a two state settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It appealed to the Israeli government to use a proportionate response to attacks and to live up to its democratic ideals. It also talks of a limited level of military response to Hamas’s rocket attacks as being unobjectionable self defence. This view entirely fails to represent why and how socialists should support the self determination of peoples. In Israel and the occupied territories there are two...

I have read with interest — and some amusement — Sean Matgamna’s history of the “Irish debate” in IS and elsewhere on the left in the period from the late 1950s to (presumably) the early 1970s. I will not comment on the series as a whole until it is completed. However I would like to comment on the most recent in the series dealing with the Irish Workers’ Group and — more specifically — its predecessor, the Irish Workers Union. Sean’s account is broadly correct. But it is ludicrous to assert that the IWU enjoyed sympathy from from Irish Catholic clergy or some “unidentified” part of the Irish...

The popular image of Victorian consists of scenes of upper class decadence, lower class destitution and a stifling morality. Working people are passive, society is stable, and the best they can hope for is a rich philanthropist to save Oliver Twist from hardship. That is a fabrication, the creation of historical spin doctors. “Nonetheless the revolutionary slogans and methods of Chartism are even today, if critically dissected, infinitely higher than the sickly sweet eclecticism of the MacDonalds and the economic obtuseness of the Webbs. ……In this sense the British working class can and must...

Gaza is “the world’ s largest concentration camp”, something to be compared to “the Warsaw Ghetto under the Nazis.” The position of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories “resembles that of Jews who once lived in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.” Given that Israel has “internalised many of the oppressive features of Judeophobes,” it is “not surprising that the Israeli state itself should already have developed marked Apartheid features.” Israel is “a failed state.” It is “the unsafest place on earth for Jews.” But “many Palestinians” continue to live “stoically and...

Respect Renewal MP George Galloway has been far from sympathetic to the case of Mehdi Kazemi, instead choosing to spew homophobic bile and defend the Iranian regime. Showing his complete contempt for human rights and democracy, he has levelled the ridiculous accusation that people campaigning against the deportation of Mehdi Kazemi are “the pink contingent of imperialism” — even though the protests are against our own government. The controversy started on 13 March on Channel 5’ s The Wright Stuff chat show, where Galloway said that the papers’ coverage of Mehdi’ s story amounted to...

Particularly since it expelled the bulk of its founders and trade union activists in 2006, the Workers’ Power group has been notable for combining rhetorical ultra-leftism with opportunism and wild political zig zags. Now the r-r-revolutionaries have surprised even the most jaded sectarian-watchers by supporting a first preference vote for Ken Livingstone, rather than Lindsey German of the SWP/Respect, in the upcoming London mayoral elections. Workers’ Liberty is advocating a first preference vote for German and a second preference for Livingstone. While the threat posed by Boris Johnson is...

Delegates will meet at the National Union of Teachers Conference in Manchester this month (21-24 March) in the middle of the union’s first national strike ballot for 22 years. Most activists are expecting a strong yes vote to endorse the union’s opposition to a 2008-10 pay deal which offers three further years of pay cuts. Tory-era trade union laws on balloting have however made it much harder for workers to take part in union ballots and much more likely that they will not even receive a ballot paper. Such conditions may effect turnout in this ballot. Should the ballot be successful, however...