Solidarity 261, 17 October 2012

Tories - the antidote: fight for a workers' government!

What lies ahead with the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition government? Seventy per cent of their planned cuts are yet to come. The Government plans to cut £50 billion from the Health Service. Its Health and Social Care Act, which aims to transform the NHS from a public service into a marketplace based, for now, on government funding channelled through GPs, will make the cuts hurt worse. By quarter 2 of 2012 there were 97,000 fewer staff in state schools and FE than before the 2010 election. Benefits are being cut, first disabled benefits and housing benefit. George Osborne announced a further £10 billion...

Hobsbawm, party and class

To explain why Eric Hobsbawm backed Kinnock over the Labour left as “a pre-occupation with party over class” seems to me misleading (“The paradox of Hobsbawm’s legacy”, Solidarity 260). I don’t think this is his view, but Liam McNulty’s phrasing implies that Marxists prioritise “class over party”. While in a “first principles” sense this has an element of truth — because we put the goal of working-class self-emancipation higher than allegiance to any organisation as such — in practical terms it is wrong. As Trotsky put it in ‘What next? Vital questions for the German proletariat’ (1932): “The...

Socialist regroupment in Australia

Regular readers of Solidarity will remember our coverage of the regroupment talk on the Australian left. Socialist Alternative, a group which used to be widely reviled as sectarian, has gained ground, is planning merger with the smaller Revolutionary Socialist Party, and has talks set with the Socialist Alliance. On 11 October I talked on the phone with Mick Armstrong, a longstanding leader of Socialist Alternative (S Alt). He said that SAlt has been “able to broaden its activities”; “but that’s been going on over a period of years”. Contrary to what some say, it is not a “rapid change or...

After 20 October, organise!

The TUC has called its second mass demonstration in two years against the Coalition Government’s cuts agenda. The first, on 26 March 2011, was successful in mobilising a large number of people from labour movement, campaigning, and community organisations to take to the streets. The focus of 20 October (slogan: “a future that works”) is against job cuts as well as against “austerity”. The TUC is in a unique position to call this demonstration. It is the only organisation with links to all the unions and the ability to reach out to community and campaigning organisations. Individuals and groups...

Scots to vote in 2014 on independence

On 15 October, Prime Minister David Cameron and Scottish Prime Minister Alex Salmond agreed a deal for a Scottish referendum in late 2014 about independence. It’s good news that the referendum will have one clear-cut question, rather than offering more options and the possibility of an ambiguous outcome. It’s bad news that discussion of Scotland and England, rather than of class against class, will be pushed to the fore in the midst of global crisis and spiralling inequality. Independence will not help Scottish workers deal with the crisis, any more than it has helped the workers of other...

A sectarian sidetrack in Syria?

Is the democratic uprising of the people of Syria against Assad’s tyranny being sidetracked into sectarianism? A recent report by journalist Nir Rosen in the London Review of Books (27 September) describes the point of view of Syria’s Alawite minority. Rosen has no illusions about the regime and “the fury of its repression”. “In six months in Syria I had been at more than a hundred opposition demonstrations. I had been shot at in many of them”. He refers to Alawites who have joined the opposition and are “regarded as traitors against their sect”. But in an Alawite village Rosen saw the funeral...

South African labour war spreads

The labour war which has gripped South Africa’s mining sector has spread. Workers at a Toyota plant struck for four days, and a strike by Johannesburg truck drivers prevented fuel giant Shell from making deliveries. Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese born billionaire and philanthropist, has now waded in against the ANC government in South Africa for losing its sense of direction and attacking striking workers! He criticised the ANC for perpetuating extreme right policies as he awarded Desmond Tutu a new prize last week. The controversies within the ANC and the hostility to any media penetration into...

South Yorks NHS services prepared for sell-off

In South Yorkshire, the first series of health services are due to be handed out to private companies under the “Any Qualified Provider” (AQP) programme, which was extended under the government’s Health and Social Care Act. Under AQP providers of health services are approved for a particular treatment by Central Commissioning Groups and can then be chosen for treatment by a GP and patient. The government has obliged local health commissioners to use AQP for a set number of services and by this mechanism is forcing through privatisation. In South Yorkshire treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome...

West Coast fiasco shows need for publicly-owned railway

After months of controversy over the awarding of the franchise for the West Coast Main Line railway, the government has offered Richard Branson’s Virgin Trains a 13-month extension of their contract, to allow rebidding to take place. The contract had been awarded to rival operators First Group, but following a public campaign by Virgin the government decided the bidding process had been flawed. For the labour movement, the issue here is the madness of the privatised railway system, which has combined ever more public funding with enormous fare rises, massive job losses and the destruction of...

Learn the lessons of Savile scandal

Allegations of rape and sexual assault against Jimmy Savile have now reached 340 lines of inquiry with 40 potential victims. Questions are raised about sexism; gender dynamics; why “stranger rape” persists as the dominant conception of sexual assault; and how behaviours are dismissed as normal or inevitable (a Stoke Mandeville hospital trainee occupational therapist had concerns but thought Savile was “just a pervy old man”). But, as the list of implicated organisations grows, the case raises serious questions about services, accountability and safeguarding. Fundamentally, a severe lack of...

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