Solidarity 213, 3 August 2011

Can we talk to the police?

In Solidarity 191 Sofie Buckland asked whether socialists should back police fighting cuts in their service, concluding we should not (http://alturl.com/nzcz8). A debate on this has developed on our website — extracts below. [The police] are workers in uniform. To say so is an objective statement, not a political position. The fact that we can all tell angry stories about how crap the cops treated us doesn’t alter the currently necessary work that the police also do every day — roles that will still need to be fulfilled in a society where working-class interests finally rule. “Winning over...

Facebook is not an organising tool

A decade ago, it was not easy to convince some on the left to begin using net-based tools to communicate and organise. Today, we run the risk of becoming over-reliant on some of those tools, most notably Facebook. This is not the first time I (or others) have addressed the weaknesses of Facebook. Much of what has been written has described theoretical possibilities of things going wrong. For example, Facebook could — in theory — close down any group, page, cause or event you might set up without warning or explanation or right of appeal. We had a case a few years ago of Facebook shutting down...

What did Amy Winehouse leave us with?

Amy Winehouse seemed to walk willingly into the mould of rock’n’roll cliché, but what is her legacy? Her songs were largely self-penned, so credit is due for that. And having listened back to a few of them in the last week, some of them are very good; she really could sing. But, in the end, is her undeniable talent the thing that allowed her album sales to rocket or her image to sell magazines? No. Winehouse’s assets to the industry also included a rather shaky sexuality, which strutted around on spindly legs, and made me feel like a mother watching a child tentatively take their first steps...

Media workers need a culture of solidarity

Mike Jempson, the Director of The MediaWise Trust and a senior lecturer in journalism at the University of the West of England, spoke to Solidarity. The Murdoch scandal confirms what a lot of us have said for a long time — that there's a very unhealthy relationship between people in positions of power, including the police, and the media. Nothing that's emerged from the scandal has shocked me, with the possible exception of the statistic that of the Metropolitan Police's 45 press officers, 10 previously worked for News International. We've been advocating on behalf of the people most affected...

After Murdoch scandal?

Someone once famously described the outbreak of World War One - how the powers, one after the other, were drawn into it. They were, he said, like mountaineers, roped together. First one fell, then another, and soon they were all falling, pulling each other into the abyss. The Murdoch press scandal in its effects on British public life is a little like that. First came the discovery that the phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler had been hacked, that some messages had been deleted, with the effect that the police and her parents thought she was still alive and using her phone. Where...

How the AWL’s democracy works

The AWL’s annual conference takes place on 22-23 October. Because we are a relatively small organisation, the conference is open to all members; but because we have grown substantially in the last year, this will be the first conference many AWLers attend. The way our conference works tells you something about the kind of organisation Workers’ Liberty is. We want the maximum possible democratic control by an active, alert, educated membership. For us democracy is not just a pleasant notion; it’s the essential condition for an organisation which can debate and hammer out ideas, and orient and...

Working-class protests sweep Israel

The last few weeks has seen the most powerful protest movement in Israel’s history on issues not relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict. On 30 July, a series of huge demonstrations took place across the country, involving 150,000 people (Israel’s population is slightly over one tenth of the UK’s). The movement has been so powerful that it has won words of support from centrist Kadima party, and even prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has conceded some ground. Kadima, like all liberals, love to "vote with the wind." They jump on the band wagon when they see a movement has public support. The fact...

Crown Woods: death of a comprehensive

In the early 1980s, Crown Woods School was London’s largest comprehensive. It had a thriving Sixth Form. It had a ‘farm’ which students tended, and a Rural Studies course. It had a ham radio set-up. Unusually for a state school, it even had a boarding wing. Over two thousand students were on the school’s roll. They came from a wide area of South-East London, and spoke between them several dozen different languages. But the students of the class of 1981 could have been no more apprehensive walking through the school’s entrance-foyer to start the school year than I was. Crown Woods was my first...

New rank-and-file initiative in Sheffield City Unison

A promising new campaign has started in the Sheffield City (Local Government) branch of the public sector union Unison. The branch has been run by ineffectual officers with scarcely any democratic life or real connection with its members since it was closed down in the early 2000s by the regional bureaucracy in order to oust SWP members in the branch leadership. This has left it floundering in the face of cuts to members pay and conditions - most recently in the form of the single-status pay and grading changes and now a recruitment freeze and threats of redundancies as a result of the Labour...

How low-paid workers in Tower Hamlets took on G4S... and won

There are 26 PFI (Private Finance Initiative) schools in Tower Hamlets. The cleaning, catertaking and maintenance services were outsourced many years ago to G4S, the huge security corporation. It's one of the biggest companies in the world and its Chief Executive, Nick Buckles, is one of the highest-paid bosses in the country. The workers G4S employ in Tower Hamlets are very low-paid and are often only in a school for two to four hours each day. Many of them are from a migrant background and don't have good English language skills. The company wanted to change the method by which the workers...

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