Solidarity 163, 19 November 2009

A wave of cuts in universities

On Monday 16 November 100 students and teachers of the University of the Arts London staged a demonstration outside the Chelsea College of Art and Design. They were protesting against the management’s new business plan for the University which will see 183 jobs cut, including 36 compulsory redundancies and the elimination of 16 courses in one school alone, the London College of Communication (LCC). The week before, students at LCC, organised in the LCC Oppose Campaign, had staged a sit-in protest in one of the lecture theatres at the Elephant and Castle LCC campus. Despite the sell-out...

Local Government cuts: They say the crisis is over...

“There is likely to be at least a 10 per cent budget squeeze [in local government] from next year, possibly more if the Conservatives win the next general election”, reports the Financial Times (11 November). Since much that local councils do is a matter of legal obligations, with their costs largely fixed beyond each council’s control, ten per cent is a huge squeeze. It comes from probable cuts by the New Labour government in the local government “settlement” for April 2010 (tax money redistributed from central government to local government); from reductions in local income, from fees and...

Scottish Defence League: Glasgow turn-out flops

The Scottish Defence League (SDL) had planned to stage a city-centre rally in Glasgow on 14 November. In the event, they spent most of their time sitting in a pub, reliant on the protection of a couple of hundred police officers. “Scotland United” (SU) — launched in October to meet the SDL threat — staged a rally followed by a demonstration through the city centre on the day. It staged the rally and demonstration as an alternative to mobilising to confront the SDL. An alternative group, “Glasgow Anti-Fascist Alliance” (GAFA), was also set up because activists were concerned that any SDL...

Threat from the right: face up to the grim facts

A rolling wave of right-wing politics threatens to engulf Britain in the period immediately ahead. The first thing we have to do is tell ourselves the truth about it. Socialists have to look realities honestly in the face if they are ever going to learn how to change capitalist society fundamentally and learn how to replace it with working-class democratic socialism. Especially, the grimmest realities. The slump has massively undermined capitalism's credibility with wide sections of the people. But the dreadful state of the forces of socialism mutes and stifles presentation of a socialist...

The long march of Chris Harman

“Any man’s death diminishes me”... Indeed. So it is with the sudden death of Chris Harman, in Cairo, on the eve of his 67th birthday. He was the last of the old guard of the International Socialists to be in or close to the central leadership of the SWP, IS’s now distant descendant. Chris Harman’s near-half-century of political activity encompassed most of the history of the organisation that, despite its recent decade of alliance with Islamic clerical fascism, remains the biggest ostensibly revolutionary organisation in Britain and retains influence in other countries. Of course we offer his...

Postal Workers - Don't Turn This Truce Into Surrender!

With the return to work on the basis of the “interim agreement”, where are? Management in many areas are continuing their bullying and harassment as before, charging people with wilful delay for not completing their deliveries in time and taking them off pay, they are keeping casuals in many mail centres and delivery offices, and they are refusing to review the changes brought in by Executive Action over the year. Rather they are making plans for their next round of job cuts. Some areas have almost walked already. When the union announced it was calling off the planned strikes in exchange for...

General election coalition launched

A coalition to stand trade union and left general election candidates was announced at the Saturday 7 November conference on political representation called by the rail union RMT. Click here for letter from the AWL to other left groups about coalition plans. The planned coalition has the backing of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist Party, the Alliance for Green Socialism and is supported in a personal capacity by Bob Crow (general secretary of the RMT), Brian Caton (general secretary of the POA), National officers in PCS, and national executive committee members of the CWU...

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