Solidarity 182, 7 October 2010

It was always going to be a politically divisive cut among Tory supporters. That is why the Tories used their own conference to announce the cuts in Child Benefit for the better-off. They wanted to tackle this most tricky announcement before the much more devastating cuts due in the Comprehensive Spending Review (20 October). Patrick O’Brien of the Daily Express defied logic by denouncing it as “the worst proposal since the poll tax”… But I don’t remember the Express being a big supporter of the anti-poll tax protests. It was, he insisted, a “kick in the teeth” for middle-class people...

The problem of creating a new stratum of intellectuals consists in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development... The traditional and vulgarised type of the intellectual is given by the man of letters, the philosopher, the artist. Therefore journalists, who claim to be men of letters, philosophers, artists, also regard themselves as the "true" intellectuals. In the modern world, technical education, closely bound to industrial labour even at the most primitive and unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of...

“In mass politics, to say the truth is precisely a political necessity.” The life of Antonio Gramsci is rightly well known - his birth into a poor household, his role in the Turin strikes and factory occupations, his work for the Communist International and eleven years' imprisonment by the fascist Italian government in 1926. Less well-known, and less well-understood, are Gramsci's writings. Unfortunately this book will do little to remedy that lack of understanding. Anyone reading a few morsels of Gramsci’s writings will immediately recognise his extraordinary revolutionary mind, which...

The strike for re-grading and equal pay organised by women sewing machinists at Ford Dagenham in 1968 is one of the heroic episodes of British labour movement history. In terms of both working-class militancy and women’s self-assertiveness, it was a product of movements that were already on the rise, and an important catalyst for further struggles and gains in the period that followed. The machinists originally called for their jobs to be re-graded from unskilled (Grade B) to semi-skilled (Grade C), but it soon became clear that a big underlying problem was the existence of a ‘women’s rate’...

Britain already has the tightest and most worker-hostile trade-union laws in the European Union. And now what do they want to do now, the bosses, sections of the press, and sections of the Tory party? To tighten the laws even further! To hog-tie the workers and our unions even more than we are hog-tied already. They have the jitters about what the labour movement will do when the details of the government's cuts programme are spelled out on 20 October. The bosses' "trade union", the Confederation of British Industry, has called for a series of new laws. Ballot decisions to strike should be...

Dan Jeffery, Assistant Branch Secretary of Lambeth UNISON, spoke to Solidarity in a personal capacity. How did Lambeth Save Our Services begin, and how has it developed? Save Our Services initially came out of Lambeth UNISON, GMB, NUT and UCU thinking there needed to be an anti-cuts campaign in the face of the huge cuts from both the Tory/Lib Dem government and the local Labour council. We then got various community groups and activists to come on board, produced 10,000 newsletters for the Lambeth Country Show and have organised several anti-cuts demos and lobbies. This resulted in saving over...

The Scottish TUC’s anti-cuts demonstration in Edinburgh on Saturday, 23 October, is likely to be the biggest demonstration in Scotland since the anti-Iraq war demonstrations. Cuts are begining to bite. Housing Benefit cuts amounting to over £27 millions a year will leave 75% of all claimants in Scotland worse off — on average by around £7 a week. Linking public sector pensions to the Consumer Price Index instead of the Retail Price Index will cost Scottish public sector pensioners around £17 billions over the next 20 years. The average local government pension in Scotland is £4,700 a year...

Note: the version of this article that appears in the printed edition of Solidarity is substantially abridged. London Underground station staff in RMT and TSSA are currently in dispute over proposed cuts to staffing levels, which will see the equivalent of 800 jobs lost. These cuts will have a massively detrimental impact on both safety and the quality of service. Against a barrage of media abuse, they have stood firm for the vision of an underground system that meets the needs of both workers and passengers. Janine Booth, Workers' Liberty member and Secretary of the London Transport Region of...

On 16-17 October AWL meets in London for our annual conference. We've prepared for this by a series of regional meetings and discussion bulletins. A lot of discussion has centred round "perspectives", especially in relation to the Labour Party. Readers of Solidarity and of our website will know that there has been a running debate in AWL on this since last spring. That debate has arrived at the point where the contentious points to be voted on concern only small-ish amendments to a perspectives document. Documents on AWL and the unions, and on feminist activity, have received substantial...

The Lib/Tory government has broken off talks with the unions about the redundancy pay entitlements of civil service workers. The government plans to "cap" redundancy payments for those sacked at a maximum of 12 months' pay, and for redundancy-volunteers at 15 months'. This will make it cheaper for the government to make the vast job cuts - maybe one-third of total staff - which they plan for the civil service. The Labour government introduced milder plans to reduce severance pay. In May the PCS union won a legal ruling that the change was illegal. The new government has introduced legislation...