Left groups and people

Socialist Green Unity Coalition, Respect, SWP, Socialist Party, Weekly Worker, IWCA, RDG, Green Party, Ken Livingstone ... and a few others.

Bastani: why won’t you debate Brexit?

Aaron Bastani, co-founder of online news platform Novara Media, has responded to an article in the Guardian on 26 May about calls for a debate on Brexit at the 2018 Labour conference... by trying to witch-hunt the AWL. The article quotes three anti-Brexit Momentum members in support of the call for a debate. On Twitter Bastani accuses the AWL of being behind a “plot” with the Labour right to destabilise the Corbyn leadership through a debate on Brexit policy. To build up his ludicrous picture of an AWL plot, Bastani says Rida Vaquas, one of the activists quoted in the Guardian , is a member of...

NEC slate debates

The decision of the Labour Representation Committee, Grassroots Black Left and Red Labour to challenge the official Centre Left Grassroots Alliance slate for Labour’s National Executive is a tactical mistake. We agree with these comrades that the method selection for the CLGA slate has been opaque for some time. It is unclear how groups are able to be involved and level of control they then have over the agreed candidates once in office. The decision of Momentum to unilaterally declare their full slate and push that through the CLGA is also unwelcome. However, with only a short time left to...

TV fictions and AWL reality

An open letter to Ashok Kumar It’s been said before, and it will bear saying again. If everything published by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in the last five decades were to disappear, and if future historians of socialism had to rely on what our political opponents said about us, then the historians would find it impossible to make political sense of the story. On the one hand we are people who do, and have always done, everything we can to help workers in their struggle against employers and governments. We throw everything we have into that. We preach working-class revolutionary...

National Policy Forum row

The 17 February meeting of the Labour Party National Policy Forum (NPF) saw a row over electing a new chair. Created as part of the Blairite process of blocking internal democracy, the NPF substitutes itself for the fully demonstratic policy-making conference that is needed. Abolition of the NPF as one of the aims of the democracy review would be a welcome step. So what was the row? Former National Executive Disputes Committee Chair, and previous member of the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance slate for the NEC, Ann Black looked like she had the votes in the room to become the chair of the NPF...

Momentum dominates left slate for NEC election

Momentum has proposed a slate for the elections to the constituency section of Labour’s National Executive, to be held this summer. As we understand it, this slate has also been (narrowly) approved by the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance. The first-time additions of Ann Henderson, Huda Elmi and Nav Mishra to the slate do make it the most diverse it has ever been. However, not everyone is happy. The departure of Rhea Wolfson and Christine Shawcroft, possibly to help them secure parliamentary seats is regrettable. Christine Shawcroft is a long-standing activist on the Labour left, has regularly...

“The working class is the key”

Moran Shirin of the Iranian Revolutionary Marxist Tendency spoke to Solidarity . There were many workers’ protests on Sunday-Monday, 7-8 January. Mostly they’ve been about unpaid wages. These include: Haft Tapeh sugar cane workers; Khalij-e Fars Transport (2-4 months of unpaid wages); Phases 22 and 24 of the South Pars gas field development in Asaluyeh (temporary contract workers have not been paid for six months). Zar Shooran gold miners have not been paid since November. Tabas council has not paid its workers for three months. Ghaemshahr Textiles workers have just had some of their three...

Trump in America and the world

On 22 December, US President Donald Trump passed the most significant piece of domestic legislation of his term thus far, the so-called “Tax Cuts and Job Act”. This tax reform, one of the most sweeping in decades, will cut corporate tax by 15%. The package also includes measures such as lowering taxes on overseas profits. The BBC’s summary of the act was to the point: “The tax reform is good news for businesses, particularly multinational corporations and the commercial property industry. The extremely wealthy and parents sending their children to private schools are set to benefit.” This...

'Anti-Zionism’, Antisemitism, and the German New Left

To download this as a pdf click here During the night of 8/9 November 1969 monuments in West Berlin commemorating victims of Nazi persecution, including one marking the destruction of a synagogue in the city’s Schoneberg district, were vandalised. “Shalom”, “El Fatah” and “Napalm” were painted on the monuments, in the colours of the Palestinian national flag. On 9 November itself a member of the “Black Rats, Tupamaros West Berlin” planted an incendiary device in the city’s Jewish Community Centre, timed to ignite when the annual commemoration of “Kristallnacht” took place in the grounds of the...

Unions must fight for robust rules

Editorial from Solidarity 453 The public scandal which has erupted in the wake of reports of historical and current sexual assaults in Hollywood, and now the UK Parliament, has brought to light a day-to-day reality. The #metoo campaign was “successful” because it touched on a truth. Almost every woman has experienced some form of sexual assault or harassment. The public conversation in wake of the reports and allegations is welcome and important. The revelations about Harvey Weinstein, with which this public conversation began, showed how men in positions of power can perpetrate abuse on, in...

Tūmanako*: New Zealand’s Labour-led government

Twenty-six days after a general election, and on the eve of the Labour Day holiday weekend, (21-23 October) Aotearoa (New Zealand) has a new Labour-led coalition government. New Zealand’s Labour Day public holiday was celebrated for the first time in 1900. The Liberal government of the day offered the new public holiday instead of acceding to labour movement demands for a lawful eight-hour working day. It is poignant that it was this weekend when we learned our wish to be rid of the outgoing National (Tory) government meant swallowing the rat of a coalition government with the nationalist New...

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