Solidarity 194, 23 February 2011

Labour and socialist historian Dorothy Thompson died on 29 January at the age of 87. She is best known for her large and tremendously important work on the 19th century Chartist movement. Thompson took an over-arching view of Chartism as a movement, never overlooking the contributions of the individual men and women involved. She studied in detail the culture of Chartism and the role of gender within it, without retreating from what was at root a class analysis. In The Early Chartists (1971) she stressed the diversity of Chartism while emphasising its national character. Her major work, The...

What happened in Egypt over the last few weeks has a clear historic parallel in the events of August 1980 in Poland. In both cases, weakened authoritarian regimes crumbled as popular unrest spread. In Poland and Egypt, state-controlled labour fronts proved unable to control the masses; new, independent unions were formed in struggle. In both countries, religion provided a means of expressing dissent — and both the reactionary Roman Catholic church and the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood posed threats to the prospects of genuinely progressive change. And in both countries, small groups of...

The British Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP) was a sizeable organisation up to its implosion in 1985. From 1976, in order to fund its daily paper, Newsline , the WRP took money from Libya, Iraq and other vicious dictatorships, rewarding its paymasters with anti-Jewish propaganda and support for those regimes, dressed up as “anti-imperialism”. In 1981, actress Vanessa Redgrave, the WRP’s best known member, sued our comrades John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna for libel for comparing the WRP to the Moonie sect and the Scientologists, and for reporting that the WRP used systematic emotional and...

Bahrain On Saturday 19 February security forces withdrew from the Pearl Square area in the capital, Manama, allowing pro-democracy demonstrators to return to a place which had become the centre of the protest movement. The state forces, many of whom are Sunni Muslims recruited outside Bahrain, had killed seven protesters over the previous week. The overwhelming majority of the demonstrators and 70% of the population are Shia. Shia people are discriminated against in Bahrain. All real power is in the hands of the Sunni monarchy and its hand-picked politicians. On the marches one popular chant...

So far 13 new political parties have announced their existence in Egypt. Among them is a “Liberation, Development and Defence Front”, which declares itself as of the secular left, and has collected 20,000 signatures calling for its recognition. It seems likely this is an intiative from people from a broadly Communist Party background (although the Egyptian CP formally dissolved in the mid sixties). Within the youth organisations which were central to organising the protest movement from January 25 onwards, there are attempts to develop more long-term forms of organisation. When a committee of...

Strikes in the [state-owned] leather industries were held on 1 February. The workers called for safety benefits and remunerations. They wanted to expose the lies of the administration about the bankruptcy of their company. They have more than one contract with the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Trade and other ministries to provide them with leather goods. The third demand was against “self-financing”, which is a kind of privatisation. The strike continued for two weeks, until 14 February. The administration promised to answer the workers’ demands, except the demand safety benefits. In...

I should like to take issue with Cath Fletcher’s view ( Solidarity 3-193) that a significant part of the recent anti-Berlusconi protests smacked of “conservative moralism” in its criticism of Berlusconi’s private choice to enjoy sex parties. Berlusconi is not a private citizen but the head of a government in an unspoken alliance with the Vatican. It fully supports the latter’s profoundly anti-women, anti-gay, pro-life policies and attitudes, underwritten by billions of euros to sustain schools, property and the 50,000 religious teachers in the public school system. Berlusconi annually presides...

The AV referendum on 5 May will not tackle the accountability of MPs, their inflated incomes or the other many flaws of Britain’s bourgeois democracy. The choice is between the current first past the post (FPTP) system or an AV system that arbitrarily manufactures an apparent majority for every MP, as a paltry means of shoring up their legitimacy. AV is not proportional representation, because it retains the constituency link. AV might be more proportional in some elections, but it could be perversely disproportional in others. In 2005, New Labour had a 66-seat majority with 35% of the vote...

Unison members at Nottinghamshire County Council will strike on 24 February against the Tory-run authority’s plans to axe 1000 jobs in the next three months. The council proposes to spend a total of £60 million making 3,500 redundancies over the next three years. Voting two to one in favour of action, these workers are the first to stage industrial action against job cuts. Their action is vitally important for all public sector workers facing cuts. Since winning the council in 2009 the Tories have pledged to transform their ideological commitment to “smaller local government” into direct...

The Daily Mail on 22 February carried an article reporting on “top secret” government plans to undermine strikes, with the Cabinet Office setting up a special “unit” to “prevent Britain grinding to a standstill in the event of mass public sector walkouts.” According to the Mail , the plans include developing relationships with private firms to provide scab labour to break strikes, and establishing special contingency arrangements in key areas to maintain services during any industrial action. The Mail claims that government minister Francis Maude has analysed the workforce at thousands of...