Solidarity 283, 24 April 2013

In two months, Workers’ Liberty will host Ideas for Freedom, our annual weekend of socialist discussion, debate, education and training. It takes place at the University of London Union, and will feature lectures, workshops, film-showings, debates, and other sessions designed to give those who are already socialists a chance to discuss our politics, and to persuade those who are not already socialists to become so. Many speakers will be Workers’ Liberty members, but there will also be speakers from a range of other groups and backgrounds. We want Ideas for Freedom to be a space where genuine...

Fifty thousand people marched on Saturday 20 April to defend Stafford Hospital against threatened cuts in services and jobs and against private healthcare companies taking over their hospital. Fifty thousand people took to the streets in a magnificent display of support to defend their local hospital despite it having recently suffered some of the worst publicity of any hospital in the history of the NHS. Fifty thousand people (in a borough with a population of 126,000) crowded into the town square, with a shared understanding that cuts and underfunding inevitably lead to excess patient deaths...

Elizabeth Truss, Tory Childcare Minster, says toddlers in nurseries “run around aimlessly”. She says they should be in a more structured environment, learning the skills they will need when they get to “big school” (i.e. reception class). Who is this woman? Has she ever met a toddler and what is she going on about? Elizabeth Truss employs a nanny to look after her two children. Possibly the only context she’s ever met a toddler is one in which they are fed, watered, shiny from the bath, and ready for bed. Many toddlers do indeed like to run around. But the activity is not pointless. Give them...

The battle to shape the contemporary public perception of Margaret Thatcher began immediately after her death on 8 April. The terms of the debate were neatly summed up in the contrasting front pages of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. “The Woman Who Saved Britain” announced the Mail whereas, for the Mirror she was “The Woman Who Divided a Nation”. The Tories presented Thatcher as a figure of such immense stature that the whole nation could unify in remembering her with respect despite the passionate opposition she generated when in power. The drew the obvious parallel with Churchill. They knew...

The Hong Kong dock strike is approaching the one-month mark, with workers holding firm on their demands and escalating their action. After unsatisfactory negotiations on 17 April, workers set up a protest camp outside the headquarters of Hutchinson Wampoa Ltd., the parent company of the Hutchinson Port Holdings Trust, of which Hong Kong International Terminals Ltd. is a subsidiary. The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions is demanding a 23% pay increase. Its members have faced a decade-long wage freeze and some workers earn an average hourly rate of less than £5 for shifts that can last up...

Tony Blair, fresh from joining the praise for Margaret Thatcher and saying that as prime minister he sought to “build on” what she had done rather than reverse it, has again blasted Ed Miliband’s Labour leadership as being too left-wing. In the New Statesman (11 April), Blair urged Labour to “resist the temptation” to come back “as the party opposing ‘Tory cuts’.” Labour must “search for answers”, he said, instead of just expressing anger. Blair offered no “answers” himself, but hinted what he might support by insisting that, “paradoxically”, the crisis has brought no “decisive shift to the...

This is the description of Marco Travagio, Italy’s finest radical journalist, of the decision of Friday 19 April by electors in Italy’s lower house to return 87 year old Giorgio Napolitano to the office of president, only weeks after a seven-year stint in the role ended. “The scene supersedes the most hallucinatory fantasies of the masters of horror, Stephen King or Dario Argento. The putrefying, evil smelling corpse of a rotting system, corrupted and squashed by the weight of cliques, cabals and mafia of every sort, of bribes, blackmail and endless plots, barricades itself in the tomb...

Trident nuclear submarines, each carrying about 120 nuclear warheads capable of mass destruction, have been held on the deep loch of Coulport, near the military town of Helensborough, Scotland for over 30 years. A peace camp of many caravans and buses, was built 31 years ago near the base. Life can be tough there, some want to leave and there are discussions about keeping the peace camp open. It will close unless enough people willing to live there come forward. Although Britain has signed a nuclear non-proliferation treaty the Tories want to renew Trident and spend around £100 billion on...