Solidarity 302, 6 November 2013

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) met for our annual conference on 26-27 October at the University of London Union. The purpose of the AGM is to review our activity over the previous year, debate and decide policy, agree our political priorities, and elect our National Committee. The conference noted some significant successes. AWL has been integral to the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, which has beaten back Tory attempts to cut maternity and A&E services, preparing the hospital for closure. We helped coordinate the international campaign to defend Australian trade unionist Bob...

Revelations of US and other state espionage on their own and foreign citizens has taken a farcical turn with the claim by Der Spiegel magazine that the US National Security Agency (NSA) monitored the mobile phone of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The NSA is accused of spying on several European and other government communications. The US and UK ambassadors in Berlin have been summoned for questioning. The huge scale of spying became clear in June 2013 when the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers published evidence provided by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and...

On Friday 1 November a motorcycle stopped outside the party offices of fascist Golden Dawn movement in the north Athens suburb of Neo Iraklio, and the riders shot the Golden Dawn members that were guarding the offices. Two Golden Dawn members were killed, and another critically injured. No-one knows who organised the killing, but regardless of that the murders are, politically, a provocation that will harm the anti-fascist movement and the left. The “professional” form of the attack suggests a prescribed professional execution plan and experienced operators. Such actions are unlikely to have...

Government minister Maria Miller says that the clash between the three big political parties and the main newspaper lords can be finessed. Newspaper publishers will be free to decide whether or not to sign up to the royal charter on press regulation which will eventually lead to a “recognition panel” being set up to vet the regulatory body. In the meantime, says Miller, she encourages “the press to go forward with their own self-regulatory body”. She may even be right. The differences between the government’s scheme and the newspaper lords’ is thin. Both include the most worrying proposal to...

24 December is the end of the consultation period for local Labour Parties and trade unions on the proposals about Labour’s trade union link being prepared by Ray Collins. Much will depend on the stance of Unite, the biggest union affiliated to the Labour Party. Although Unite is considered a left-wing union, and although its United Left group, which commands a majority on the union executive, has voted for uncompromising defence of existing union representation in the Labour Party, the union’s position is ambiguous. We understand that the union’s National Political Committee has passed a...

On 30 October, the Save Lewisham Hospital Campaign and Lewisham Council beat the government at an appeal hearing in the High Court. A judge once again ruled that Kershaw and Hunt had acted beyond their powers, and that it was unlawful for them to have overridden the objections of the Lewisham Clinical Commissioning Group. The government may now want to go to the Supreme Court but the more real and pressing danger is that the government will rush through changes to the law. The government still wants powers to cut the NHS and this court ruling puts a real limit on their ability to do that...

Solidarity 301 (25 October) reported on the case of Maria, the “unusual” girl found living in a Roma community in Greece and removed from her family. Fanned by racist outcries from the media, Maria was quickly proclaimed to probably be of Northern or Eastern European origin and in all likelihood trafficked, all based on her physical appearance. The reason the Greek authorities gave for their suspicions about her origin was the inability of the family to produce documents for Maria. Solidarity rightly pointed out at the time that many Roma travel and live without documents, often unable to...

On 25 October, NUT and NASUWT (the two largest teachers’ unions) called off a planned national strike, pencilled in for 27 November. It will not be at all obvious to teachers, who struck in huge numbers in regional strikes in June and October, why the national strike has been pulled. And that is because there is no discernible reason. It isn’t because the regional strikes were not well supported. The turnout and mood at the rallies and marches organised on those days could hardly have been better. Union leaders continued to talk at those events as if the next step was a national strike. Nor...

Iranian trade unionist Shahrokh Zamani was imprisoned in June 2011. Many workers like Zamani have been imprisoned, and some tortured, on charges of “propaganda”, “endangering national security”, and “participating in an illegal organisation”. Iran’s clerical rulers are no more friends of labour rights than they are of women’s rights, religious freedom, or LGBT rights. The labour movement in Iran was instrumental in the overthrow of the hated despot Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The strikes that took place and the workers’ councils that were set up in 1978-9 brought the country to a standstill...

For about 200 or 250 years, and until recently - that is, throughout almost the entire history of "politics" in the modern sense and of the labour movement - every activist, indeed everyone who reckoned to take an interest in the world around them, would regularly read newspapers, or if illiterate listen to someone telling them what was in the papers. This is a longer version of the article than in the printed paper. See also "Bring back the pamphlet" (October 2012); "Why we should switch our computers off more" (September 2010); and "Why the revolution will not be tweeted" (January 2011) -...