Solidarity 189, 19 January 2011

Floods of sloppy reporting

Last Thursday, 13 January, I bought a copy of The Independent , because it had six full pages on the floods in Brisbane, Australia, the city where my daughters live. I learned nothing about the floods that I didn’t already know, but something about the deterioration of newspaper standards. The six pages read like copy churned out by harassed and uninterested journalists instructed at short notice by the editor to fill the space. Better reporting, with fewer blunders, could have been done by a single person with an hour available, an internet connection, and a desire to check and question...

Hunger amidst record crops

World wheat prices increased about 70% in the second half of 2010. Overall, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s world food price index was, by the end of 2010, as high as the peak it reached in 2008. The FAO expects it to go higher still in 2010. Food prices rose very fast in 2007 and the first half of 2008; dropped again in the second half of 2008 as the financial crisis “deflated” economies; and have been rising since early 2009, with a lull in the first half of 2010 and a sharp increase since then. Overall, food prices are about two-thirds higher now than they were at the start of...

The point of selling socialist papers

I’m friends with an ex-member of another Trotskyist group. He is still a socialist, and active in left-wing politics as well as union activity, but no longer organised by a revolutionary tendency. One thing he’s often said to me is that he doesn’t see the point of public paper sales, except if they’re linked to activity for a campaign or anti-cuts committee. There are many reasons why the AWL does public sales of Solidarity, and one of them is to talk to people about the campaigns we’re involved in. But I want to challenge the idea that such activity is pointless for winning people to...

Resist the Lib-Lab drift!

“A fledgling Lib Lab pact is being forged”, declared Mary Riddell in the Daily Telegraph, 17 January. Exaggeration, no doubt. But Ed Miliband is trying to push the Labour Party into accepting a Lib-Lab coalition as its goal. Accepting that goal would mean resisting all moves to swing Labour left, away from neo-liberal policies acceptable to the Lib Dems. It would block off the possibility of a government that will legislate for workers’ rights and reverse what the Tories are doing now, rather than building on it as Blair built on Thatcher. The unions and the Labour left, so far silent about...

Make Labour councils defy the cuts

Labour and trade union activists meeting on 15 January in London at the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) conference voted almost unanimously to call on Labour councils to defy the Tory/ Lib-Dem cuts. The LRC is the biggest grouping of the Labour left, and has the affiliation of six unions, four Labour-affiliated and two (RMT and FBU) not. Only one speaker at the conference, Charlynne Pullen, a Labour councillor from Islington, north London, demurred. Her council has put out a leaflet denouncing the local cuts (pictured below), and council leader Catherine West has told anti-cuts...

Iraqi railworkers demand security benefit

Iraqi railworkers who work on the railways heading south from Baghdad are fighting for pay increases and security benefits after several workers died in explosions on the track. The railway, which heads south from Baghdad to Samawah, crosses a particularly dangerous territory in which armed gangs are active. Instead of providing adequate security for the trains and their workers, railway bosses have attempted to pay off the gangs themselves. Falah Alwan, president of the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions in Iraq, said “railway workers have been suffering from mines and explosions. The...

Tunisia: "The dictatorship not just the dictator!"

Shawky Arif, a Tunisian political activist, spoke to Solidarity. The situation is still fluid and fast-moving. The head is gone, but the body of the dictatorship remains. So-called “new” leaders coming forward are all members of the old regime and its truly-criminal system. The people of Tunisia continue to demand a wholesale break with the decades of dictatorship. We need the dissolution of the old ruling-party. We demand that members of the ruling party face justice for their corruption and for sanctioning the use of violence and torture against opponents. The head of the main union is a...

Islamist threat in Tunisia?

We don’t know how strong the Islamist threat is in Tunisia. The country has a long tradition of secularisation, and some vocal secularists. Yet that was true in Iran, too, in 1978-9, in the tumult which ended with the coming to power of Khomeini’s Islamist dictatorship, more crushing even than the Shah’s. That tumult included tremendous workers’ strike movements on democratic and secular demands; but the fact that the mosques had become the only tolerated place of opposition under the Shah, the strength of the Islamist cadre of clerics and religious students, and the complaisance of the left...

It's all normal out there!

When an event as earth-shattering as the uprising in Tunisia happens, the BBC has its finger on the pulse. A BBC News Channel presenter turned on Frank Gardner, the security correspondent who was once shot while on assignment in Saudi Arabia, leaving him wheelchair bound for life, and asked the all-important question: “Frank, there are reports that President Ben Ali has fled the country, how will that change things for the British tourists still there?” Gardner, to his credit, discussed the serious part of the question first. But never fear, the BBC had a correspondent at Gatwick airport who...

"NCAFC is the political core of the movement"

Michael Chessum, a co-founder of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), talks to Solidarity about the organisation’s conference (Saturday 22 January), and the role of student struggle. The NCAFC is the major organisation leading the anti-cuts movement in education. It needs to develop its own structures, and we need to have a debate about how these will work. The NCAFC is the organisation that will play a durable, stable role in leading the student anti-cuts movement and linking up with the workers’ movement. There are other bodies, such as the national education assembly, but...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.