Solidarity 236, 29 February 2012

Thousands of jobs on the line as councils prepare new cuts

As local councils begin setting their 2012-2013 budgets, working-class people face another round of attacks as councils across the country put jobs and services back on the chopping block. Proposed job losses at larger councils figure in the hundreds. Leeds City Council plans “savings” of £55 million, including axing 400 jobs. Swindon Borough Council’s draft budget seeks to shed over 100 jobs as part of a £12 million cuts programme, including cutting trade-union facility time. £24 million and 300 jobs could go at Labour-run Stoke-on-Trent City Council. Nearly 400 jobs are on the line as...

Eamonn McCann on Gery Lawless in the London Irish left

Gery Lawless, once a prominent figure in the Irish émigré left in London, died in January at the age of 75. [ See 2012 footnote on Eamonn McCann's later views on Gery Lawless, below. ] Before the 1969 upheavals A snapshot of his activity at the time when it was most important — when he was secretary of the Irish Workers' Group (IWG) in 1965-8 — is given by the document from the archives below: a letter written in mid-1967 by Eamonn McCann (since 1969-70 a well-known journalist and writer loosely linked to the SWP) to Sean Matgamna. In the “histories”, the IWG is usually called Trotskyist —...

Jim Riordan, the Spartak spy

I knew the writer and academic Jim Riordan, who died last week, briefly in the early 90s when I was researching, and active in politics, at Surrey University where he was professor of Russian. I had heard rumours of Jim before I ever met him — stories about his kindness and his eccentricity, a political eccentricity that didn’t sit well with his academic life in a department that was well know for inducting linguists into a very NATO-oriented “realist” theory of International Relations. The thing that did strike me about him was his mandarin disdain for the pettiness of what he saw as...

Socialism in one cell?

There are two basic types of cell in the living world: the cells found in bacteria (prokaryotes), and the cells found in plants and animals (eukaryotes). They have characteristic differences in their structures and behaviour. Prokaryotes have a circular DNA molecule consisting mainly of genes; they multiply by dividing (!) to give identical daughter cells; their protein-making machinery (ribosomes) are of a particular size; their outer membranes have a particular structure; and they are much smaller. Eukaryotes have linear DNA molecules in pairs (chromosomes); the genes come with lots of “junk...

Fidel Castro's legacy: Cuba as a class society

Pablo Velasco and Sacha Ismail review Cuba since the revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment , by Cuban-American socialist Sam Farber . The 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro and his 26 July Movement to power was a bourgeois revolution which smashed Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, but replaced it with their own Bonapartist regime. Half driven by US hostility and half by choice, this government opted to become a Stalinist state in 1961, adopting the model of the USSR and similar states. Farber calls this a “bureaucratic system of state collectivism”, in which society’s economic...

The Treason of the the Intellectuals

“I have, I suppose, a sneaky hope for a few of these pieces, but in general I make no claim that this is poetry. That belongs to an altogether higher order of things. This is workaday political verse — politics understood in its broader social sense, to include the politics of such things as religion and emigration from Ireland. It is the sort of verse that was once very common in socialist and other publications and is now rare. “Political verse nowadays tends to be dismissed as a contradiction in terms. Of course, it was not always so. Politics, the overall running of society, shapes and...

Help the AWL to raise £20,000

Last year Barclays paid just £113 million tax on its profits (globally £5 billion, of which around half was made in the UK). Barclays, an enormous multinational bank, paid about 5% tax, much less than the workers who clean its corporate offices or staff the desks in its high-street branches. The government has been shamed into introducing legislation to close some of the loopholes that have allowed banks and other multinationals to carry out this kind of tax avoidance, but the figures speak for themselves. The Tory mantra that cuts are necessary because “there’s no money” is simply a lie...

NHS sell-off bill can still be stopped

Lib Dems are scurrying to tweak the Government’s Health and Social Care Bill with last-minute amendments in the House of Lords before it comes back to the Commons after Easter. Their aim is to head off an emergency motion, opposing the Bill outright, which rank-and-file Lib-Dems want debated at their party’s spring conference in Gateshead on the weekend of 10 March. The Tories have spoiled the Lib-Dem leaders’ efforts by shrugging and saying that the amendments are “not significant”. The latest opinion poll, published on 20 February, showed 52% saying that the Health and Social Care Bill...

NHS private patients

When I started work in the NHS in 2003, I was surprised at the number of private patients who were being treated on the children’s ward I was working on. I knew that the NHS hospital had private wards and had assumed that private patients would be treated there and that I, as an NHS nurse, would not be looking after them. In fact private patients literally queue-jumped to use the same hospital facilities and be treated by the same staff as NHS patients. The result of this is that NHS patients had to wait longer for care. Not only this but they were often prioritised for private rooms, not on...

Hungary: rise of Jobbik

Stan Crooke’s article on Hungary’s Fidesz government ( Solidarity 235) outlined its right-wing, anti-democratic programme. It is worth also noting the rising popularity of Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary). In the 2010 election Jobbik won 17% of the vote. Fidesz’s spell in government has done nothing to undermine that support. Though the ruling alliance of Fidesz and Christian Democrats leads opposition parties, at the end of 2011 polls put Jobbik on 21%, just behind the Socialists on 22%. Moreover, Jobbik is very popular with young voters, enjoying 30% among the 18-37 age group. Jobbik...

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