Solidarity 194, 23 February 2011

Support the new Middle East workers' movement

Two months after Mohamed Bouazizi, a street fruit-seller in Tunisia, burned himself to death in protest at poverty and official harassment, setting off an upheaval in his country, almost the whole Middle East is socially aflame. Tyrants have fallen in Tunisia (14 January) and Egypt (11 February). As we go to press it looks as if Qaddafi in Libya, the most vicious of them all, is the next to go. Protests have spread to Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, and Iraq, and beyond the Arab world to Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan. We can read well-informed analyses telling us why Syria, or Jordan, or...

B is for Bolshevism

A complete account of Bolshevism would require many shelves-worth of books. But the term “Bolshevism” and its variants are thrown about with such a mix of enthusiastic and antagonistic abandon that some form of straightforward understanding is very important. One widely-held version of “Bolshevism” claims that the Russian Marxist movement split into two factions (the other being the “Mensheviks”) over the question of “what sort of party” at the 1903 congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party (RDSLP). The split is posed as between the Bolsheviks who advocated building a revolutionary...

Ada Nield Chew: "I could not stay silent"

As the misery and injustices of the capitalist system are laid bare in the starkest manner and the life chances for our children diminish before our eyes, the words of a young and politically inexperienced Ada Nield Chew should be taken on by us all: “I feel it to be personally degrading and a disgrace upon me to remain silent and submit without a protest to the injustice done me.” Ada, then working in a clothing factory, wrote these words as part of a series of letters she had published anonymously in the Crewe Chronicle in 1894, describing the injustices of factory life. Ada explains the...

Sop for low-paid public sector workers cancelled

In 2010 the Government declared a three year pay freeze for all public sector workers, but said that those on less than £21,000 workers (67% of workers in local government) would get £250. Even that little promise has not been kept. Now, for the second year running, local government workers are to have a total pay freeze. Unison, the main local government union, says it is launching a campaign to make Osborne deliver on his promise to the low-paid in local government, schools and colleges. But in fact Unison leaders effectively gave up months ago. Back in October Unison put in a pay claim for...

Doctors prepare for action

On 17 February, at a London meeting of the British Medical Association, around 250 members voted to end the policy of “critical engagement” with the government and move to a position of outright opposition. The meeting also called for a poll of members on industrial action to stop the bill. Doctors have traditionally been deeply conservative. In 1948 the BMA opposed the formation of the NHS, and in the 1950s they threatened to destroy the NHS with action over pay. Doctors appear left-wing at the moment because the centre of gravity in mainstream politics has shifted so far to the neo-liberal...

NHS: bigger U-turn needed

The Government has done a small U-turn on the issue of price competition. As it currently stands, the Health and Social Care Bill proposes that the NHS tariff should be”only the maximum price that can be paid for that service”. Private providers would compete with the NHS in a cost-cutting race to the bottom. In a letter to NHS bosses, Chief Executive Sir David Nicholson has said that introducing price competition would be “extremely dangerous” for the NHS. It looks like there will be a rewording of the Bill before the third reading in the House of Commons. In the North East, Care UK had...

University battles continue

The Government’s huge cuts in university funding are rippling through, especially in the less posh universities which have no reserves or endowments and don’t think they can get students to pay £9000. Liverpool Hope University is the first of the Merseyside institutions to send out redundancy notices — about 100 of them, 60 to teaching staff. The Merseyside Network Against Fees and Cuts has been leafleting the campus and we’re finding that people who previously might have been resigned to the cuts are stirred up when it comes to the prospect of their module or their lecturer not being there...

Hospitals shut services

Many hospitals are losing funding from several streams, both central and local government, as well as from Primary Care Trusts. For example, Homerton Hospital in Hackney, north east London, faces cuts of at least £15m. First in line are midwifery and language advocacy services. The cuts to midwifery are all the more senseless given an annual growth of 19% of births at the hospital. According to the hospital’s Unison branch, “Particularly shocking is the dissolving of the Shoreditch Group Practice which was set up in an area known to have high deprivation and infant mortality rates, along with...

Irish election round-up

Three comments on the Irish general election due on 25 February. Fine Gael shifts right By Liam McNulty Fine Gael, the largest opposition party and descendant of the pro-Treaty establishment and the fascist Blueshirt movement, has pushed ahead in recent polls leading up to Ireland's general election on 25 February. It s benefiting from two processes. The first is conjunctural. The recent spell of political instability which saw Fianna Fail leader Brian Cowen unceremoniously pushed out of his leadership position had sown in some the illusion that "strong leadership" is a prerequisite for...

Egypt and the fight for democracy

“It is impossible merely to reject the democratic program; it is imperative that in the struggle the masses outgrow it... “As a primary step, the workers must be armed with this democratic program. Only they will be able to summon and unite the farmers. On the basis of the revolutionary democratic program, it is necessary to oppose the workers to the ‘national’ bourgeoisie. “Then, at a certain stage in the mobilization of the masses under the slogans of revolutionary democracy, soviets [workers’ councils] can and should arise... “Sooner or later, the soviets should overthrow bourgeois...

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