Solidarity 196, 9 March 2011

Children’s Minister Tim Loughton has started talking about “allowing” transracial adoption (he means white parents and non-white kids). The underlying message is “right on” social workers are keeping non-white kids “locked up” in the care system. One recent report said that the government wants to change the law that ensures children can only be placed with parents of the same ethnic background. But there never was a law. There was only ever government guidance which stated that social workers should take in consideration a child’s race, ethnicity, cultural background. Well, shock horror! All...

Usama Hasan, an imam at the Tawhid mosque in Leyton, East London, has been hounded and threatened with death for stating that he believes in the theory of evolution, and that Muslim women are not obliged to wear the hijab. In his 20s Hasan, who is now 39, was a radical Wahhabi (a follower of the branch of Islam which is the state religion of the Saudi autocracy), devoted to supporting various international jihadist causes. He later renounced these views and became an opponent of radical Islamism, making him a prominent Islamist target. After Islamists disrupted his prayers and lectures and...

Mark Porter, chair of the hospital consultants’ committee of the British Medical Association, has warned that: “Very deliberately, the government wishes to turn back the clock to the 1930s and 1940s, when there were private, charitable, and cooperative providers of healthcare." “But the system failed to provide comprehensive and universal service... That’s why health was nationalised. But they’re proposing to go back to the days before the NHS”. Already the Thatcher and Blair governments have damaged the Health Service by bringing more and more market economics into it. This cabinet of...

A government review has recommended that police overtime and other payments above basic wages be cut, and that 28,000 jobs be cut from police and back-up staff. Paul McKeever, chair of the Police Federation, reckons that “with the two-year pay freeze and a likely increase in pension contributions... police officers are likely to suffer a 15-20% reduction in the value of their pay”. Although last October the Government spoke of giving police the right to strike, and in 2008 the Police Federation decided by a large ballot majority to demand the right to strike, at present the cops have no such...

In Wisconsin, the movement against the anti-union Walker Bill is entering a new phase. Protestors have been cleared out of the Capitol building, which they had been occupying since 15 February. But trade unions and other grassroots campaigners against the bill are still rallying and organising actions and demonstrations outside the Capitol building; and fourteen Democratic senators are still in hiding in Illinois, thereby making it constitutionally impossible for the Wisconsin state senate to pass the Bill into law. Meanwhile, similar bills are being passed in other states — there are ongoing...

According to Asian news agencies, small scale demonstrations have sprung up in parts of North Korea. Although the details of these protests are not clear and there is little suggestion that they amount to a determination to fight for immediate regime change, they are potentially highly signficant. The lack of food, electricity and basic utilities are the most likely reason for the demonstrations. Challenging the regime directly is too dangerous, and most North Koreans simply don’t have enough knowledge on the possible “alternatives”. It is also unlikely that these protests have been directly...

Vijay Prashad is a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut (USA) and the author of books including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World" . He spoke to Martin Thomas of Solidarity about the uprising in Libya and the prospects for the democratic revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East. This is a longer version of the interview than printed in the paper . There's a difficulty in knowing exactly who's benefited in Libya from the last period of neo-liberal policies apart from Qaddafi and his family because there's no data. If you want to know who...

Tamer Fathy, International Coordinator of the Centre for Trade Union and Workers' Services , spoke to Sacha Ismail. We held the first conference of our independent union federation yesterday [2 March - see here ]. It was attended by hundreds of activists from sectors including the retail tax collectors, health technicians, pensioners, teachers, telecommunications, textile workers, iron and steel, from the industrial regions of Sadat City... The 24,000 workers at the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company at Mahalla, in the Nile delta, have decided to leave the state union federation and join ours...