Solidarity 169, 19 March 2010

To stop cuts, seize control of the banks!

The Tory shadow Chancellor George Osborne must think he pulled off a coup on Monday 15 March. He got Jeffrey Sachs - a real economist, an architect of Russia's "shock treatment" after 1991, but who has since distanced himself from extreme free-marketism - to co-author an article with him for the Financial Times. The article said that the Tories are right to go for rapid, big cuts in public spending to reduce Britain's Budget deficit, rather than a slower approach which includes waiting and seeing whether future growth will erode the debt more painlessly. The European Commission gave Osborne...

My life at work: on an offshore rig

Bob Carnegie is a seafarer on an offshore gas rig. What's the job like, and what do you do? I'm employed as a merchant seafarer on a semi-submersible gas rig off the north-west coast of Australia, the Ensco 7500. The reason I'm employed is that under Australian Marine Orders, self-propelled rigs have to have a certain marine complement. I work night shifts, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, on a three-week cycle: three weeks on the rig, and then three weeks back home in Brisbane. For the merchant seafarers on the rig, a lot of our work is looking after life-saving equipment and trying to keep...

"What-ism" in the 21st century?

Someone has put a lot of time and money into the new Counterfire website launched by the sixty people who recently quit the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) with John Rees and Lindsey German. It's very slick, and frequently updated. Money and time in? And what comes out? That is less clear. A launch announcement is entitled "Leninism in the 21st century", but says nothing about Leninism, or indeed about the 21st century, unless coverage of "the crisis in capitalism" or "alternatives to the discredited and failing policies of the political elite" were unthought of in the 20th century. When the...

Iraq: now fight for a labour law!

Full results from Iraq's 7 March parliamentary election are not due until the end of the month. Best guesses so far are that the "State of Law" slate of Nouri al-Maliki - prime minister since 2006 - will win the largest chunk of seats, though nowhere near a majority. Iyad Allawi, the former Ba'thist and CIA favourite who was the US-appointed prime minister in the "interim government" of 2004-5, but has since been in eclipse, is said to have done well, especially in Sunni-Arab-majority areas, with his Iraqiyya slate maybe winning the second biggest block of seats. The Iraqi National Alliance...

We can beat the Tories! John McDonnell talks about SCSTF

We're faced with an avalanche of cuts in public expenditure and public services if the Tories get in, and, to drive that through, almost certainly an attack on trade union rights and civil liberties such as we haven't seen since the Thatcher period. If we stand by and let the Tories get in, flanked by the fascists marching on the streets, we're letting our society be undermined for decades to come, as it was under Thatcher. Everything we do now must be focused on keeping the Tories out. But Gordon Brown is still following a strategy of "triangulation", like Tony Blair's similar strategy. As we...

Agitation and accommodation: the union "organising agenda"

Review of " Power at work: Rebuilding the Australian union movement", by Michael Crosby. Federation Press, Sydney, 2005. In later writing, Crosby has described a union-organising campaign which he considers a model as "unashamedly top-down". This book is the view from "the top" of the "organising agenda" which US, Australian, British and other unions have adopted since the late 1990s. Crosby is a former Australian union leader who became director of the ACTU [Australian TUC] Organising Centre; then went to work for SEIU, the US union which has most pushed the "organising agenda"; and is now...

New rules, same BNP

The BNP have changed their membership rules allowing "non whites" into the realms of party membership. Although the stunt has gained much attention, anti-fascists know full well how little difference this will make to party policy. Let us make no mistake about it; the BNP will always remain, at its leadership and rank and file, a racist organisation. A party on the extreme right, a party holding firm links to violent neo-Nazi organisations and a party seeking to wreck working class relations within Britain’s towns and cities. The BNP are an ever-growing and serious fascist threat, with deep...

Reclaiming the game

We speak to Jules Spencer of the FC United of Manchester board. Q: Do you think the financial turmoil gripping several football clubs - from top-flight Portsmouth to aspirant lower-league sides like Notts County - is an inevitable result of the hyper-commercialisation of football as a sport over the past two decades? There are a myriad of reasons for the current financial state of the game, but central to these reasons is instability within the clubs, owners promising much but delivering little. The two examples you cite are perfect examples of that, where supposed rich owners have promised...

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