Solidarity 229, 11 January 2012

Lessons of the Stephen Lawrence murder

That Gary Dobson and David Norris have been jailed for the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence was for the people who loved him, some sort of justice. But as Doreen Lawrence has pointed out it cannot be the end of the matter. The details of the Stephen Lawrence case and the inquiries and investigations which followed have been thoroughly revisited recently but the lessons of this terrible story bear repeating. Two things stand out. The police have not — as some pundits would have it — made “good progress” since Stephen’s death. They are still incompetent, racist, corrupt, thuggish and a...

Help the AWL to raise £20,000

From time to time someone asks us: “Why do you charge for your paper? That’s not very socialist.” It should be obvious that, in a capitalist world where everything costs money, it’s expensive to produce a newspaper — but the point is easy to forget when it comes to the broader day-to-day functioning of a socialist organisation. Without money, we cannot do what we need to do. The AWL is growing. We now publish Solidarity weekly, setting up new branches and expanding all areas of our activity. If we are going to continue this, we also need to expand our sources of funds. That’s why we’re...

Pensions: what's gone wrong?

As Solidarity goes to press on 10 January, the public-sector pensions battle is in the balance. Many unions have expressed dissent with the “final” Government proposals of 19 December. In fact, it seems that the only actual union signatures on a document are the signatures of Unison, GMB and Unite on a joint document with local government employers, and Unite has withdrawn that. Aside from that, even the union leaders keenest to put a lid on the issue are saying no more than that they will negotiate with the Government on its new terms and suspend action in the meantime. Trouble is, that is...

Labour: more to do than looking

Dave Osler ( Solidarity 228) reckons that the “search for life on Mars... will reach fruition long before anyone ever discovers signs of life in the Labour Party”. Oddly, though, Dave himself is a member of the Labour Party, and concludes his column by “we should keep looking” for that elusive “life in the Labour Party”. Dave is not untypical of Labour leftists here. If you really want a downbeat picture of life in the Labour Party, don’t ask an “ultra-left”, ask a Labour leftist. Often what distinguishes Labour leftists from SWP or SP types is not so much that they are pursuing or...

Bolsheviks, Kronstadt and democracy

Paul Hampton is wrong in his analysis of the events which took place at Kronstadt early in 1921 ( Solidarity 228). Bloodied, exhausted, half-starved, facing a ruined economy and the defeat of the Revolution in Europe, the Bolsheviks had retained state power. They could have negotiated and compromised with Kronstadt. But an offer of mediation by the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman was rejected. The revolt had been sparked off by the brutal suppression of strike by freezing and hungry Petrograd workers, itself a grave error. The Bolsheviks continued to be guilty not only of...

80% of homes unaffordable by 2016

In London, the Government’s cap on Housing Benefit payments means social cleansing, akin in its severity to the Highland Clearances. Large areas of the city will become unaffordable for working-class people, and whole boroughs will be gentrified to the detriment of affordable housing. Under the government’s proposals, 80% of privately rented houses will be unaffordable by 2016. Around 360,000 households are on council waiting lists, and rents are rising about 6 per cent a year because of increased demand for renting. A two-bedroom flat in London now costs £1,600 a month on average. Research by...

Tory benefit cuts could mean a million evictions

Gradually, and in large steps, the Housing Benefit changes introduced by the coalition government are making big areas of Britain’s cities unaffordable for all but the well-off. With the labour movement preoccupied by pension revisions and cuts to jobs and services, these steps have passed with little in the way of grass-roots resistance. A new phase of the changes started on 1 January 2012, and should be the signal for building local campaigns. Where tenants are willing to defy, campaigns should mobilise to stop them being evicted, as they stopped poll-tax defiers having their property seized...

Drive out cosmetic surgery business!

The French state is offering to remove the breast implants of 30,000 French women who got implants from Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP). The company has folded after revelations that it used industrial-grade instead of medical-grade silicone in its implants. Around 40,000 UK women also have had PIP implants. The UK government has said that it will remove implants for those women who want it only if they had the implants as part of treatment on the NHS. These women will be cancer patients who have had reconstructive surgery. This only accounts for 5 per cent of those affected. For the 95 per cent...

Solidarity 229

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Miliband waves white flag on cuts

Labour Party leader Ed Miliband has taken the sagging of the public sector unions' fight on pensions as a cue to flag up an even weaker Labour stance on cuts. On 10 January he declared that: "Whoever is the next prime minister will not have money to spend. We will have to make difficult choices that all of us wish we did not have to make". Decoded: Miliband plans for the next Labour government to continue the Tories' and Lib-Dems' cuts, only more softly. And Labour's objection to the current cuts - "too far, too fast" - will become even more muted. The coalition's cuts, by pushing down overall...

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