Solidarity 502, 10 April 2019

On 1 April, the BBC news website reported that 85 Head teachers from Birmingham had met with officials from the Department of Education. The meeting followed protests by parents in Birmingham about the implementation of the new curriculum in Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) for primary schools. The new curriculum teaches children that there are different kinds of families, including families where the adults are in lesbian or gay relationships. The BBC quoted an anonymous Head who said: "We feel completely alone here and feel as if we're getting no overt support whatsoever from the...

Algerian socialist Kamel Aïssat, from the Trotskyist group PST, explains the political crisis in Algeria. He spoke with Sam Wahch and Antoine Larrache of the NPA [New Anti-Capitalist Party, in France]. Translation by Michael Elms. The PST will mobilise with all its forces to try to broadcast our ideas, in particular about a Constituent Assembly, which is in the interests of the majority of the Algerian people, that is, workers, the unemployed, women, all those excluded by the capitalist system, whose demands must be worked into the new constitution. The mobilisation will be very big, perhaps...

Kicking off this wave of rolling strikes and other actions for better pay from Deliveroo, on 5 April Nottingham Riders’ Network-IWGB held a distribution event of food and other supplies for homeless people. Getting food donations from various restaurants, and working with a local homelessness charity, they distributed them to rough sleepers they could find around the city. As well as directly providing some relief to homeless people, this raised the profile both of the problem of homelessness – which has risen sharply in recent years – and of NRN-IWGB and their struggles. NRN-IWGB raised their...

On 5 April, a small but lively protest assembled opposite the Indonesian Embassy in London to object to the brutal military occupation of West Papua by Indonesia. West Papua is the western half of the island whose eastern half is Papua New Guinea, an independent state. The Free West Papua Campaign which organised the protest, coinciding with other protests on the same date in the Netherlands and Australia, is calling for solidarity with a West Papuan boycott of the Indonesian presidential and assembly elections that will take place on 17 April. Although it has controlled the territory since...

With the news that the forces of General Haftar have bombed Tripoli's Mitiga airport (8 April), the events in Libya have reached a critical stage. The conflict is not just about two men and their armed forces, General Haftar (former Gaddafi general, lived in USA for 20 years, warlord with military clout based in the east of Libya) and El Sarraj (head of the UN-backed nominal government, with little clout outside Tripoli). It is indirectly about the clash between two imperialist powers, France and Italy, both with a long and murderous history of involvement in Libya and Africa as a whole...

A national day of action against Universal Credit on 1 August may be a chance to revive this campaigning and to put forward the kind of welfare system that is needed. After apparently being held back since November 2017, a joint report by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and HMRC has shown the government has been well aware of the problems associated with the transition from tax credits to Universal Credit. More than 50% of the claimants surveyed were not prepared for the delay of six weeks till their first payment and of those who expected some delay almost half were unaware it was...

As Aristotle is one of the “giants” on whose shoulders Marx stands, we should take an interest in issues of distortion or vulgarisation of Aristotle’s key ideas. It might be that Martin Thomas’s comments on Aristotle ( Solidarity 499) carry a “trace” of this process. One thing Marx and Aristotle certainly have in common is their having been subject to sustained vulgarisation and distortion. The vulgarisation of Marx is a part of our inheritance and that demands we are scrupulous and forensic in our approach to classic texts (comrades might find useful the work of Michael Heinrich on the...

Cleaning workers employed by Vinci on London Overground struck on 5-6 April, demanding a wage increase to the London Living Wage of £10.55/hour. Currently the workers are paid £10.02. The workers were previously employed by Carillion, and were transferred to Vinci when their previous employer went bust. Vinci has refused to offer them a pay increase. Rail union RMT, which organises the workers, is also demanding that the cleaners now be brought in house and employed directly by Arriva Rail London, the train company that operates London Overground. Merseyrail: discuss return to action...