Solidarity 449, 4 October 2017

Labour and the 3.6% swing

The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore describes the Tory conference: “May visibly flinching at a direct question, in her babble of repetitive phrases that mean nothing. It is as if she is not really there. There is a vacancy at the top”. Bookmakers now make Jeremy Corbyn the favourite to be next prime minister. Their second-most-rated, at about 6/1 against, are Boris Johnson, David Davis, and Philip Hammond. Labour needs a swing of about 3.6% from the Tories (and a continued falling-back of the SNP, Lib-Dems, and UKIP) to win a parliamentary majority. That figure will rise if the new...

Make Labour anti-capitalist

By the end of its conference (22-26, September) Labour had agreed to take all PFI contracts back “in house” across the public services, to ballot tenants on regeneration schemes and to repeal all the anti-union laws. These policies are great starts, taking Labour towards have bold pro-working class policies but they are not enough without a commitment to a class-struggle socialism that looks to workers’ struggle as the lever to change society. Without that orientation Labour will have no “social movements” outside Parliament which are strong enough able to build support and pressure against...

Tories: clueless and callous

In an interview with the BBC shortly before Tory Party Conference opened, Theresa May told Andrew Marr: “As Conservatives, the arguments that we thought we’d had and won during the 1980s about the importance of free market economies — I think we thought there was a general consensus on that. And we now see that there wasn’t.” She had in mind the surge of support for Labour’s left-wing manifesto and avowedly socialist leader that took away her parliamentary majority in June. But her remarks were also proved right by the findings of a survey by right-wing think tank Legatum, published 29...

Sexual preference and transphobia

Solidarity 448 (20 September) carried an article called “Changing gender without defending boundaries”. In general we agree with this article’s stance on the Gender Recognition Act, opposition to scaremongering arguments and support for transgender rights. However, we have serious concerns about some of the content, particularly that which deals with sexual preference. This paragraph in particular causes concern: “Pat cites the idea of lesbians who refuse to have sex with transwomen who have penises being labelled transphobic. But it is legitimate to ask what the issue might be here. Assume...

Tories keep student fees high

The Tory government has backed off from its talk of reducing university tuition fees to £7,500, or of trying to enforce a range of fees differing markedly between universities. The only retreats it will make are to increase the income threshold above which ex-students start repaying from £21,000 a year from £25,000 from April 2018, and to leave the maximum fee from September 2018 at £9,250, rather than raising it to £9,500 as previously planned. The Government had previously planned for the threshold to be frozen indefinitely, so as to make it easier to sell off the student loan book to...

Repeal the 8th!

In May or June 2018 Ireland will hold a referendum on whether to repeal the near-total constitutional ban on abortion. This is a big deal for women in Ireland. The referendum would be won against the religious right, as with the 2015 referendum which voted in favour of same-sex marriages. Recent polling shows 82% in favour of some loosening of abortion laws. The referendum is the direct result of a “citizen’s assembly” where a demographically-balanced group of people came out in favour of repealing some of Ireland’s abortion laws, in fact more than may be on the table in this referendum. The...

The next financial crisis

According to the Financial Times (1 October), credit-card and similar debt in the UK has been soaring since late 2013, and “regulators fear banks have underestimated the potential losses they face from borrowers unable to make repayments on their loans and credit cards in a downturn. “The Bank of England says that in a hypothetical stressed economic scenario the UK banking system would suffer consumer loan losses of about £30 billion over the next few years, representing a fifth of consumer credit.” In late September Deutsche Bank researchers produced a report on ‘The Next Financial Crisis’...

Recognise Kurdish referendum result!

On 25 September, 3.5 million people (97.7%) voted for independence for Iraqi Kurdistan. Aso Kamal of the Worker-Communist Party of Kurdistan and a Coordinator for the Centre for independence of Kurdistan spoke to Solidarity . We have been campaigning for a referendum since 1999. We have had conferences in Kurdistan and across Europe, Canada and Australia and we have lobbied for support for a referendum. The issue has come to the fore since federalism has been in collapse across Iraq since the rise of Daesh. The Baghdad Government is Shia Islamist and they have opposed Kurdish rights...

£54 billion for private landlords

Private landlords have become the dominant force in housing in Britain, raking in £54 billion in rent in the year June 2016 to June 2017, while the interest paid by house-buyers to banks and financiers went down to £27 billion. Almost half the rent payments are made by younger people, and the slice of household income spent on housing has trebled over the past 50 years. Young people pay higher rents for smaller, less secure rented flats and houses, and have longer commutes, than in the 1960s. Meanwhile some better-off older people are doing well. Into the 1990s households paying off their...

Trade unions fight Macron’s reforms

French President Emmanuel Macron is driving ahead with a package of decrees to dismantle trade union rights, collective agreements and job security. Olivier Delbeke presents a summary of the fight against these decrees. 12 September A first call for action on 12 September brought together the CGT, FSU and Solidaires trade union federations who were joined by a very large majority of the local organisations of the FO trade union federation, who were voting with their feet against the anti-mobilisation policies of their general secretary JC Mailly and the federal FO leadership. UNEF, the centre...

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