Solidarity 235, 22 February 2012

Justin Baidoo, a trade union and socialist activist in South London, is standing for Unite Against Fascism assistant secretary at the UAF conference on 25 February. He spoke to Solidarity . Why are you standing? As an active anti-fascist campaigner for four years, I think there is a need for a national anti-fascist network. AWL and others tried to create something with Stop Racism and Fascism, but it didn’t go very far. Hope Not Hate is an ineffective pressure group, and farcically has just split from Searchlight. UAF, though I have many criticisms of it, is a real national network. Following...

Pete Radcliff visited Cairo earlier this month. He reports on the political situation facing democracy and trade union activists. The massacre at the football stadium in Port Said on 1 February is widely believed to have been consciously planned by the Egyptian Security forces — an attempt to divide the democracy movement by a brutal attack on a more socially isolated but physically militant section. But it has produced the opposite effect. The massacre of over 70 Al-Ahly fans, or Ultras, first led to huge street protests in Cairo and other cities and then spread far wider, involving students...

A consistent point of discussion at the Saturday 18 dayschool on New Unionism was why the period of historical New Unionism, from the late 1880s, is so overlooked by most of the far left. Many AWL members believe that it’s part of the left’s “retreat from class”, a slow ideological suicide that has seen leftists substitute first the Stalinist states, and latterly political Islam, as the progressive force that can take on the established order. If you see Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian government as the frontline of the world struggle for freedom, you’re unlikely to be much concerned with the...

In 1909, Tom Mann — one of the key figures of Britain’s “New Unionism” and the “Great Unrest” which followed it — wrote that the “essential preliminary condition” for successful struggle was “working-class solidarity”. AWL’s 18 February dayschool “New Unionism: how workers can fight back” discussed historical experiences and asked how we can rebuild that solidarity today. Over 100 activists attended, including healthworkers, tube workers, teachers, call-centre workers, Sodexho catering workers, and city cleaners, as well as students working part-time to help fund their studies. Sessions were...

On 21 February a European Union summit in Brussels agreed a second “bail-out” for Greece, or rather for the banks which hold Greek government debt. As part of the deal, EU leaders will impose on Greece even more severe cuts, and external controls similar to those imposed by the great powers of Europe on countries like Egypt and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. At the same time, drunk on neo-liberal superstition, they are pushing through a treaty to make “balanced budgets” mandatory for all eurozone countries. Even conservative and mainstream economists warn that the deal means years of...

In 1973, International Socialism , the theoretical journal of what is now the Socialist Workers Party, serialised the memoirs of the pioneering British Trotskyist Reg Groves, which later formed the basis of Groves’s The Balham Group: How British Trotskyism Began. Re-reading the book it struck me how many of the criticisms levelled by Groves against the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the 1930s could, depressingly, be applied to elements of the would-be Trotskyist left today. Commenting on CPGB intervention into a 1930 dispute in the woollen industry in Yorkshire, Groves wrote: “The...

Glasgow City Labour Group’s 15-strong majority collapsed to just two — one of which was the vote of an independent councillor — in the vote on the council’s 2012/13 budget earlier this month. In the run-up to the vote half a dozen members of the Labour Group resigned the Labour whip, some only shortly before the vote. Other rebels had previously resigned from the Labour Group (in one case, jumping ship to the SNP). Leading rebel figures say they will contest this May’s election, standing under the banner of “Glasgow Labour” on an anti-cuts platform. According to Tommy Morrison, one of the ex...

The first round of the French presidential elections is on 22 April, the run-off between the top two candidates on 6 May. The right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy, Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), is polling on 26% compared to François Hollande, candidate of the Socialist Party (PS), on 30%. However, if you add up the scores for all “right-wing“ candidates and all “left-wing“ candidates, and if they divide among Sarkozy and Hollande respectively, Sarkozy would win. If you add all the voters (left and right) against the new euro cuts treaty, then the opponents are a big majority. On the far...

The Zimbabwean state is prosecuting a group of socialist, trade union, student and human rights activists (many of them members of the International Socialist Organisation of Zimbabwe) for treason. Despite lack of evidence, the magistrate, acting as a tool of Robert Mugabe’s regime, has refused a request to dismiss the case. This means that the comrades may soon face jail. Send solidarity messages to iso.zim@gmail.com Solidarity protest: Stop the treason trial! Free the Zimbabwean socialists! 7pm, Friday 2 March Zimbabwe House, 429 Strand, London WC2R 0JR (Charing Cross rail or tube) Details...

In Hungary, capitalist crisis has led to triumph for the right, not the left. In late 2011, the Bloomberg corporation classed Hungary as the eighth-riskiest economy in the world — second only to Greece as a likely candidate for bankruptcy. Two ratings agencies have downgraded Hungary’s public debt to junk status. In October, December and January investors were not prepared to buy bonds put up for sale by the government. The market price of Hungary’s bonds already in circulation fell so that the (fixed) interest payments on them now represent a yield of 10% a year. The forint, the Hungarian...