Solidarity 226, 23 November 2011

By Eric Lee Last week’s LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference in Istanbul was meant to be an extraordinary event. Activists from the newly-independent unions of the “Arab Spring” countries were due to meet with colleagues from established unions from both developed and developing countries. As Canadian union activist Derek Blackadder put it, “100 unions, 30 countries, one class”. And there were high points, such as the visit by conference delegates to a picket line outside a factory owned by the German company GEA. The Turkish workers, locked out for weeks, were clearly moved by the...

Edd Bauer, the victimised Vice President Education at the Birmingham University Guild of Students and National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts supporter, recently received a letter from Carolyn Pike, the University’s Director of Legal Services, informing him he was banned from campus. Here is an abridged version of his reply. Dear Carolyn, Thank you for your letter of 17 November 2011, revoking my “right” to be on campus. Unfortunately I cannot abide by the ban and I regret to inform you that I have already returned to campus. I appreciate your concern for the “disruption” to students’...

3,500 have been killed and perhaps 20,000 detained since the Syrian opposition movement began to take to the streets in March. The vast majority have died at the hands of the disgusting Ba’athist dictatorship of Bashar Assad. However, increasingly fighting is taking place between defectors from the army and state forces. Civilians are also arming themselves. The dissident Free Syrian Army, based in Turkey, claims responsibility for an attack inside the capital, Damascus, on Sunday 20 November. At least two rocket-propelled grenades hit a Ba’ath party building which was later seen surrounded by...

A wave of struggles, occupations, and protests has erupted across Greece against the regressive property tax of 3.6 billion euros which is being collected via utility bills. The government backs the tax demand with the threat of cutting off electricity to those who refuse to pay the tax, because of poverty - monthly incomes of ?300, ?400, or ?500 - or because of political opposition to the tax. To cut off electricity for ill people, the elderly, and little kids is an act of naked barbarism. But the central office from which orders to cut off electricity were to be distributed round Greece have...

Two initiatives at the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) conference on 19 November may open new possibilities. One lunchtime caucus initiated a new LRC youth and student group. Another, initiated by Broxtowe (Notts) Labour councillors Greg Marshall and Andrea Oates, started to organise a network of Labour councillors committed to vote against cuts. The anti-cuts Labour councillors have issued a statement: The budgets set by local councils for 2011/2012 imposed swingeing cuts without significant opposition from Labour Party councillors. We cannot allow this to be repeated in 2012/2013...

In “Refounding Labour”, one little-noticed clause deleted almost all the rulebook said about selection procedures for parliamentary candidates. Now, in Thurrock, a marginal constituency in Essex, a small selection committee has completely bypassed all nomination procedures, and declared a shortlist of two (one an apparatchik from Ed Miliband’s office, both parachuted in without any connection to the local labour movement). Local Labour Party members get a say only in a vote-out between those two, on 3 December. Labour Parties and affiliated unions round the country should bombard Labour HQ...

Ed Miliband has called for a Labour Party “day of action” to protest against youth unemployment on 26 November. That’s good, but the positive content of the day of action is weak: a “five point plan” including such things as “a one year cut in VAT to 5% on home improvements”, which are obviously not on the scale required to make decent jobs for one million young unemployed people. And so far Ed Miliband is silent about 30 November. At other levels the Labour Party machine is edging towards support for the strike. A number of Labour councils and constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) have declared...

By Vicki Morris The Morning Star has attacked the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) conference decision on 19 November “Against British nationalism: for a Workers’ United Europe”. I have written to the Star: Anti-EU politics are a distraction from the work we need to do: building working class unity across Europe (and the world). This is our proper task, not weighing in on the side of one or other bloc of bourgeois opinion on the question of capitalist integration — a particularly vexed debate in the UK, where both sides of the argument should be abhorrent to socialists. The Morning Star...

Higher fares, cuts in services, longer standing times, hiving off the most profitable routes, station closures, fewer direct routes, and a ban on the consumption of alcohol.These proposals are contained in the SNP Holyrood government’s consultation paper on the future of the rail network in Scotland, published last week as the first stage in preparing for the re-franchising of ScotRail in 2014. Before this year’s Holyrood elections, the SNP pledged that annual fare increases would not be higher than RPI plus 1%. But last week’s consultation paper suggests increases of RPI plus 3%. Caps on...