Solidarity 229, 11 January 2012

Meeting calls for NUT to "name day" for further pension strikes

A caucus of members of the National Union of Teachers at the pension activist conference called by PCS Left Unity on 7 January agreed to press NUT Executive members at their meeting on 12 January to commit the union to name a date for a further strike before 11 February and explicitly to reject the Government's 19 December formula. The main conference session, however, 450 strong, failed to press the PCS leadership to take an initiative for continued action against pension cuts. PCS Left Unity (in effect, the PCS leadership) presented the meeting with a statement which called for the TUC...

Support the Vita Cortex factory occupation!

The Vita Cortex factory in Cork closed on 16th December and the workers refused to leave without the €1.2 million compensation promised in September when Vita Cortex management announced plans to move production to Athlone, County Westmeath. They rejected a subsequent offer of €1,500 each, calling it “Scrooge-like”, and vowed to continue occupying the foam rubber plant until they received the payments, amounting to 2.9 weeks per year of service for each worker. Vita Cortex is a subsidiary of holding company Vita Five Five Ltd, chaired by multi-millionaire Tipperary businessman and property...

Islamist victories in Egypt. What now?

The winners in Egypt’s first free election since World War Two are, in the words of prominent commentator Juan Cole, ‘the equivalent of the Tea Party’: conservative religious parties, of which the largest is the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘front’, the Freedom and Justice Party. The even more conservative Nur Party, only recently set up by the Salafist movement (which hitherto has been opposed to political involvement, and opposed the January 2011 revolution), came second. Secular parties have done badly. Cole comments, rather dispiritingly, ‘But until [the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which...

Further twists on the Government's new pension formula: accrual rates, what happens if you retire at 60

Unite health sector executive member Gill George has circulated a sharp analysis of un-noticed twists in the Government's December 2011 formulas for public sector pensions. Her analysis focuses on the NHS scheme, but most of what she writes applies in large measure to the other schemes, too. The real shocker here for me is how raising the retirement age will clobber our pensions. In the future, if we want to (or have to) retire at age 60, it'll cost us a third of our pensions. I'm also attaching a terrific article, from the Financial Times of all places, on life expectancy and disability-free...

Diane Abbott's comments were problematic, but "anti-white racism" is nonsense

Shadow health minister Diane Abbott's comment on Twitter that "White people love playing ‘divide and rule’ We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism" cannot meaningfully be described as racist. We should oppose right-wing attempts to cook up an "anti-white racism" and equate it with the anti-black and other forms of racism which pervade British society. That does not mean that Abbott is a left-winger, or that her comments were unproblematic. It seems highly unlikely that Abbott is prejudiced against white people. But in any case racism is not just a matter of individuals'...

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