Solidarity 418, 5 October 2016

Stop Calais bulldozers!

At the end of September, French President Francois Hollande announced that the refugee camp Calais would be demolished. The latest indications are that this will be completed by the end of October. Hollande had the temerity to call this wholesale eviction and scattering of more than 10,000 people, including over 700 children, a “humanitarian effort”. It is anything but. A determination to resist the eviction was highlighted by a protest on Saturday 1 October, organised by the Coalition Internationale des Sans Papiers et Migrant (CISPM) — a group of activists, who support migrants and refugees...

Court rules for Jeremy Hunt

The High Court has ruled that Jeremy Hunt did not exceed his powers in ″imposing″ the junior doctors contract. Ruling on a judicial review brought to the court by a group of junior doctors who formed the ″Justice for Health″ group, the judge ruled that Jeremy Hunt was not imposing the contract himself (which would be outside his powers) but ″encouraging employers to introduce it″. Amar Mashru, of the Justice for Health group, said “What is now allowed is the employers and employees at a national level to negotiate and agree terms which are genuinely in the interests of patients and staff. They...

Union report highlights harassment... in its own workplaces

According to a report leaked to the Guardian last week, over half of Unite the Union’s 74 female officials have been bullied or sexually harassed by fellow officials or by union members. One example of the kind of behaviour complained of was: “I have to sit among colleagues who refer to our secretaries as the girls … [They] think it is correct to refer to black people as coloured, talk about chairmen, and refer to women as a piece of skirt.” Some of the worst examples in the 39-page report, entitled “Women Officers in Unite”, related to the treatment of women officers by individual members and...

Bending the rules like Allardyce

Sam Allardyce has been sacked as manager of the England football team. He departs the national side with a 100% win record, although since he was only in post for one match, that’s not saying much. After 63 days in the job Allardyce was abruptly sacked following a expose in the Daily Telegraph. Reporters posing as Far Eastern businessmen secretly filmed “Big Sam” over dinner and drinks. In the film, Allardyce negotiates a £400,000 fee to appear as a keynote speaker (he is very adamant that he be “keynote”) at four corporate events in Singapore and Hong Kong. He also mocked his predecessor, the...

The SNP’s broken promises

Chris Law has become the third of the SNP’s 2015 intake of MPs —elected on a promise of a “new politics”, free from traditional Westminster sleaze — to be investigated by the police about their financial dealings. Law, who owns a £140,000 Aston Martin and has just put in a bid for an “offers over £620,000” castle, spent the 2014 referendum campaign touring Scotland in a 1950s Green Goddess fire engine painted in the colours of the saltire. Allegations of embezzlement concerning donations made to the campaign are reported as the reason for Law being questioning by the police. Natalie McGarry —...

Why Momentum failed (or didn’t even try) at Labour Party conference

In the days immediately after Jeremy Corbyn’s crushing re-election victory, the Labour right won a series of victories at Labour Party conference. How? It’s true that the left-wing surge in the party membership has not had time to properly feed through into left-wing dominance in CLPs, left-wing officers, left-wing conference delegates and so on. It’s also true, and well-documented, how the right used all kinds of cynical and undemocratic manoeuvres and tricks to win their victories. These factors would have caused difficulties whatever the left did. But it’s also true that much of the left...

Jeremy Corbyn shames the Socialist Party

One of the best bits of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour conference speech was his defence of migrants. "It isn’t migrants that drive down wages; it’s exploitative employers and the politicians who deregulate the labour market and rip up trade union rights. "It isn’t migrants who put a strain on our NHS; it only keeps going because of the migrant nurses and doctors who come here filling the gaps left by politicians who have failed to invest in training. "It isn’t migrants that have caused a housing crisis; it’s a Tory government that has failed to build homes. "Immigration can certainly put extra...

Organise young Corbyn supporters!

Opinion polls show the 18-24 age group as the only one in which Jeremy Corbyn, after the summer's battering by the media and the Labour right, is more popular than Theresa May. Yet another poll, done by YouGov, showed the 18-24 age range as one of the very few subgroups of Labour Party membership in which Owen Smith outpolled Corbyn. Young people supporting Corbyn and left-wing policies have not been signed up and organised, or not anywhere near sufficiently. No surprise, when Young Labour (despite now having a nominally left-wing committee) and Labour Students are under stifling party-machine...

Defend freedom of movement!

According to the media, the Labour Party conference did not discuss Brexit. In fact, though, it passed a motion from the TSSA union which: "Recognises that many of those who voted to leave the EU were expressing dissatisfaction with EU or national policy and were voting for change, but believes that unless the final settlement proves to be acceptable then the option of retaining EU membership should be retained. The final settlement should therefore be subject to approval, through parliament and potentially through a general election, or a referendum". And Jeremy Corbyn spoke strongly against...

Labour's new mass members need to organise

Peace within the Labour Party is unlikely. The right wing, the MPs, and the unelected party machine inherited from the old regime are still out to stop the left-wing surge at rank-and-file level, and they still have great power. Most Labour Party members and trade unionists hoped that the Labour Party conference in Liverpool (24-28 September) would be a means of reuniting the labour movement behind Jeremy Corbyn, who as expected was re-elected leader with a bigger vote and a bigger majority. Labour now has about 515,000 members. After being reduced to a husk in the Blair-Brown years, it is now...

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