Solidarity 471, 30 May 2018

Organise to protest Trump visit

Activists in the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts are planning to join the mass protests that will greet Trump’s arrival in the UK on 13 July. For young people, and school and college-age students especially, Trump is a particularly menacing figure because he threatens to annihilate the future world that the young will inherit. His fight against efforts to stop climate change; his reckless nuclear grandstanding; and his support for closed borders and migrant-hunting all promise to create a darker and more dangerous world in decades to come. In the USA, Trump’s callous disregard for the...

The landed plutocracy

The Crown, the Church, and five aristocratic estates with a collective wealth of £22 billion still own a thousand acres of central London’s residential building land. The wealthiest of the private landowners are the Duke of Westminster, Earl Cadogan, Viscount Portman, Baroness Howard de Walden, and the Duke of Bedford. The “Who Owns England” blog has dug into the records — official statistics are very patchy — and reckons that the Crown, the Church, and 14 private estates own around 1,453 acres of central London, or about 600 hectares ( bit.ly/land-own ). At rates of £50 to £90 million per...

Students: unite and renew the student movement

The conference of the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts is being held in Sheffield on 8-10 June. The conference follows a series of important industrial disputes in education — for lecturers’ pensions and against the destruction of further education — from which the National Union of Students has been shamefully absent. Those disputes form the background for our discussions. A groundswell of solidarity from local student activist groups, Labour Clubs and others showed meaningful support for the strike where the NUS failed. This needs to be built on. We need to renew and unite the student...

Star says: trust the Tories, trust the League

Editorials in the Morning Star on 23 May showed what wretched depths the Star is brought to by its Europhobia. The Morning Star, continuation of the old Stalinist lie-sheet the Daily Worker, is much faded journalistically, but still gets money from some union leaders: the 23 May issues boasts of subsidies from PCS, Unison, and Unite. It has some influence in Momentum. No, says the first editorial, there is no risk of the return of a “hard’ Irish border. A report by MEPs has proposed a “smart border”. “Technology” can do the trick. Which is just what the Tories say. The Star feels a need to...

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