Solidarity 421, 26 October 2016

Solidarity with LGBT Cameroonians!

In 78 countries around the world, homosexuality or homosexual activity of some kind is a crime. 38 of these are in Africa. And Cameroon has the highest number of arrests for homosexuality in the world. On 13 October 2016, there were mass arrests in a gay club in the capital, Yaounde. All of the arrestees have since been released. Some readers may have come across the incredibly moving film Call Me Kuchu, which documents the LGBT rights movement in Uganda. While the film was being made, the prominent LGBT activist and human rights campaigner David Kato was murdered by homophobes. There are...

The true face of capitalism

Philip Green is the multibillionaire chairman of the fashion retail Arcadia Group, owner of chains such as Topshop, Burton and Dorothy Perkins. With his wife Cristina he has a fortune of £4.3 billion. He has attracted hostile press before and now he is being reviled as the unacceptable face of capitalism for his part in the downfall of British Home Stores (BHS). On 20 October, MPs supported a motion recommending Green be stripped of the knighthood he was awarded in 2006 for “services to the retail industry”. Green bought BHS for £200 million in 2000 and sold it recently for £1. Now it has gone...

The end of Renzi?

As Italy’s premier Matteo Renzi and a clutch of his cronies were admitted by Obama to his final White House “do”, the substance behind the faux-carnival jollity was obvious — concern for the survival of Renzi’s government, and fears about how its fall could hit European and global financial and economic stability. In the constitutional referendum promoted by Renzi and to be held on 4 December, the polls show yes and no neck-and-neck. Yet Renzi declared when he launched the referendum that he would resign if defeated. In September, the American Ambassador unequivocally declared his government’s...

Iranian workers’ action campaign

On Thursday 20 October, the Shahrokh Zamani Action Campaign (SZAC) was launched at a meeting at the headquarters of the National Union of Teachers in central London. SZAC is a campaign to build solidarity between the labour movement in the UK and Europe and the workers’ movement in Iran. It takes its name from the Iranian painter who was jailed for 11 years for forming a trade union, and who died in jail in September 2015 despite a global labour movement campaign for his release. Similar campaigns have been launched at the call of Iranian trade union activists in other countries: in June of...

Sectarian dangers in Mosul

The progress of Iraqi forces in their effort to re-take Mosul has gathered pace. Many Daesh fighters have been pulled out of the city to consolidate their power back in the rest of the terrain they control. Daesh have used suicide attacks, carried out a diversionary operation in Kirkuk, and tried to halt Iraqi forces with clouds of toxic smoke from a burning sulphur plant; but it still seems unlikely that their fighters will be able to resist the combined forces of Kurdish peshmerga and the Iraqi army, backed by US and UK airstrikes. Several Christian villages have now been taken on the east...

The SNP, antisemitic tropes and Facebook

“Unfortunately, a comment on this thread has been deleted and the user banned for repeated antisemitic comments. Bigotry or any form of racial or religious discrimination, be it Islamophobia or antisemitism, simply will not be tolerated on this page.” That was the commitment given by the SNP Friends of Palestine (FoP) on its public Facebook page in December of last year. It is a commitment that the campaign has spectacularly failed to implement. Over the past ten months its Facebook page has carried a plethora of textbook examples of how traditional antisemitic tropes are incorporated into...

A socialist who grew with the movement

Ernie Lane was an active fighter for revolutionary socialist politics - as he understood them, in different ways over the years - in Brisbane, Australia, from the late 1880s through to 1954, a model of persistence and tenacity though not always of acuity. Jeff Rickertt, author of a recently-published biography of Ernie, The Conscientious Communist, talked with Solidarity about Ernie and about the book. I was interested in pre-Bolshevik socialism in Australia, and even the better books written about that don't have much in them about Queensland. Another reason for writing about Ernie was his...

The Times, AWL and Momentum: more shoddy journalism

On 21 October Times senior political correspondent Lucy Fisher and chief political correspondent Michael Savage published an article about the AWL entitled “Hard-left Corbynites dismissed as softies”, glued together with out of context quotations, snippets from Facebook, gossip, inversion of reality and anonymous sources. The article refers to the Workers’ Liberty pamphlet Transform the labour movement – aim for a workers’ government , which it quotes fleetingly. Some of what it says is true (for instance, we do indeed call for Labour MPs to take only a skilled worker's wage "in... solidarity...

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