Solidarity 378, 30 September 2015

Not the way to fight gentrification

The protest against and attack on the “Cereal Killer” café in Shoreditch, East London, on Saturday 26 September would be funny in its ridiculousness if it weren’t so politically misleading. “Cereal Killer” sells breakfast cereal — but at upwards of £3.50 a bowl. No doubt the owners are pretentious and middle-class. No doubt they were only able to open such a café due to the changing nature of the area bringing in a clientele with large disposable incomes. No doubt the launderettes, greengrocers and corner shops that used to provide for a working-class community have been replaced. However none...

The "Marxists" who call Jeremy Corbyn "ultra-left"

Jeremy Corbyn has joined many demonstrations and protests over the years, and all to his credit. When there have been conflicts within the left, however, Corbyn has tended to shy away, or go with whatever looks most like a broad consensus. Yet on 11 February 1991, Jeremy Corbyn joined another left Labour MP, the late Bernie Grant; ourselves, then grouped round the weekly Socialist Organiser ; and some people now round Socialist Resistance, in a protest sit-in against the manipulation by another left faction of the movement against the Gulf War. The driving force in the manipulation was a group...

Can Corbyn's Labour tackle climate change?

If Labour adopted Jeremy Corbyn’s discussion document Protecting our Planet as its environmental policy it would be the first serious attempt by a mainstream political party to face up to the challenge of climate change. Protecting the Planet is a huge improvement on Tory and New Labour policies, which pay lip service to environmentalism whilst subsidising big energy capitalists and polluters. It is also out-greens the Green Party who combine reactionary Neo-Malthusian analysis with vague promises to tinker with the energy market. The document states that the labour movement and environmental...

Not quite caught up

This Labour Party conference hasn't quite caught up with the Corbyn earthquake. To a campaigner outside the conference entrance, selling papers, leafleting, lobbying, and so on, this 2015 Labour conference looks surprisingly undifferent from others since 2010. 2007 was perhaps the low point. Standing outside the conference, I could see almost no young person going in who wasn't sharp-suited, bland-faced, with all the insignia of a careerist. Since 2010 it's become different. Socialist papers sell pretty well at the conference entrance, left-wing leaflets are welcomed. Surprisingly, there are...

The media and Corbyn: in place of fear

There is no reason why any attentive socialist should be surprised at the treatment of Jeremy Corbyn by the British media. Angry yes, surprised no. The great majority of the print media is after all Tory. The very rare exceptions to that rule purvey a peculiarly tepid form of liberalism which holds that growing income inequality and poverty are very bad things, but that the collective working class action which would reverse it is, on balance, the greater evil. Across the entire national press only the Daily Mirror has shown consistent support for Labour. Much of the reaction to Corbyn’s...

Nurses won't work for low pay

The editorial in Solidarity 377 blamed nursing shortages on a lack of nurse training and a lack of visas for overseas nurses. The picture is more complex. In March 2014 the NHS employed 371,191 qualified nursing staff. At the same time, the Nursing and Midwifery Council had 680,858 active registrants. Even accounting for those nurses who are working in management, for the private sector, or overseas there must be still tens, if not hundreds of thousands of nurses have left secure NHS employment for agency work. There is no shortage of nurses. There is a shortage of nurses willing to work for a...

Something to learn from the past

Although familiar with Martin Thomas’s educational agitation, analytical explanations and delivery of argument in discussion over the last five years: I don’t share the same historical tendency, having come to political maturity through the Communist Party of Great Britain (original CPGB 1920-1991) in its final eurocommunist stage. Martin, in Solidarity 377 makes some good points in his feature on the possibilities of a Young Labour revival. Orthodox Trotskyist sects and Communist Party national roads to socialism were deeply affected by high Stalinism; influencing some in the Labour Party and...

Sticking to The Theory

The Corbyn surge has drawn into the Labour Party hundreds of thousands of people previously outside it. It couldn't have done that unless, before the surge, there was enough oomph inside the Labour Party to get the Corbyn candidacy going (which wasn't easy: he was the fourth person approached to be a left candidate; he wasn't keen; enough soft-left MPs had to be pressured into nominating him that enough right-wingers would feel embarrassed about denying him the few extra nominations necessary to get on the ballot paper). In my letter ( Solidarity 376) about which Mark Osborn complains (...

Capitalism makes us ill!

It is good that Corbyn has appointed a Shadow Minister for Mental Health, not least because the government is failing to provide adequate mental health services to meet current demand. People in mental health crisis are routinely told there are no inpatient beds available. People who have been detained under section can find themselves transported in a cage in the back of an ambulance for hundreds of miles in pursuit of elusive inpatient beds. Neither government, NHS managers or commissioners take responsibility for this situation. There is a desperate need to re-open inpatient wards to stop...

Realism or illusion? The left, Labour, and reforms

While the Labour right openly try to sabotage and smear Jeremy Corbyn, more subtle Labour centrists tell him that he must move only as fast as the middle ground. The Labour left surge of the early 1980s saw the same debate. That makes this exchange from that time relevant today. Vladimir Derer was the secretary of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, a central force in that early-1980s surge and still important today. Sean Matgamna of Workers' Liberty replied to him in Socialist Organiser, then the paper of a broad range of activists on the Labour left. By Vladimir Derer Comrade O'Mahony...

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