Solidarity 476, 8 August 2018

The dangers of Germany's new left populism

Sahra Wagenknecht, co-chair of the parliamentary fraction of the German left-wing Die Linke party, has announced the launch-date and name for a new extra-parliamentary “broad movement”. It will be launched on 4 September, and it will be called #StandUp. On one level #StandUp — targeted at members of Die Linke, the SPD (German Labour Party), the Greens and those not members of any party — is a response to last year’s general election results. The CDU (German Conservative Party) and the CSU (regional Conservative Party, in Bavaria) saw their vote fall by eight percent but still won the highest...

LETTER: A terrain of struggle

I agreed with much of Omar Raii’s article about the political content of football. I’d like to suggest some friendly amendments to his argument. Firstly, while he is clearly right that nationalism plays into and feeds off tournaments like the World Cup, I’m not convinced that this is as mechanical a relationship as is sometimes suggested. England’s unexpectedly brilliant performance doesn’t seem to have given any kind of electoral filip for Brexit or the government. Similarly, despite Emanuel Macron’s embarrassing theatrics at the final, France’s World Cup win has done nothing to bolster his...

Protests against Serco attacks on Asylum seekers’ housing

On the last Friday in July Serco emailed less than a dozen public authorities and NGOs in Glasgow to inform them that as of the following Monday it would be implementing a policy of changing the locks on the accommodation of asylum-seekers who had been refused asylum. It is unlikely that the timing of the announcement was coincidental. The Scottish and UK Parliaments were both in recess, as too was Glasgow City Council. At a rate of up to ten a week, 300 asylum-seekers – many of whom would be in the process of appealing but still awaiting written confirmation of this, or, alternatively, might...

Danger posed by Robinson retrial

Far-right leader Tommy Robinson has been released prison after he had his conviction for contempt of court quashed. The Court of Appeal has ordered a new trial. This will be a major boost for Robinson’s supporters and his own profile. He now awaits a new hearing on the charge of contempt of court. Always prepared to offend, Robinson compared his time in prison to being in Guantanamo Bay, claimed he was moved from Hull to Onley, a prison with a 30% Muslim population and put in a cell opposite the “Prison Mosque.” No such “mosque” exists. As his complaint letter to the prison states, what...

Mick Woods 1954 - 2018

Mick Woods died on 19 July at the age of 63. He was an activist of the tendency which is now Workers’ Liberty from the mid 70s to 1984, and remained a committed socialist until his death. As all the tributes since his death have testified, Mick combined commitment with wit, critical thinking, and unpretentiousness. The tribute from Roger Welch, an ex-activist of the same vintage, says it well: “a genuine revolutionary but also one with an irreverent sense of humour and healthy cynicism regarding the sort of lefties who reek of self importance”. Mick went with the group around Alan Thornett in...

Ryanair must change

Ryanair pilots in Ireland, Sweden and Belgium will strike for 24-hours on Friday 10 August. The strike is part of an ongoing dispute as pilots are demanding a fair and transparent approach to transfers between different bases. On 25 July Ryanair escalated the dispute by threatening to sack 100 pilots and 200 cabin crew, or transfer them to Poland. Pilots based in Ireland, and members of FORSA union, have already struck for four periods of 24 hours since 12 July. They may be joined by pilots based in Germany and the Netherlands after a poll by the Association of Dutch Pilots saw 99.5% of...

Wildcat strikes against racist boss

On Tuesday 31 July Indianapolis welder Antoine Dangerfield filmed what became a viral video, watched over 2 million times in two days, of a wildcat strike by Latino construction workers building a new UPS hub. In the video and in a subsequent interview with Jacobin magazine Dangerfield explains that some Latino workers, working for a different contractor but in the same hub were ordered to go home (effectively sacked) by a white boss he calls racist. Dangerfield explained to Jacobin that workers had disobeyed an order from this boss: ″We have safety meetings, and we usually have a translator...

Pakistan: Khan is no alternative

Pakistan can be added to the list of countries whose politics have been dramatically shaken up in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The Movement for Justice party — PTI from the initials of its Urdu name – led by former cricketer and multi-millionaire Imran Khan, got 0.8 percent of the vote in 2002, boycotted the elections in 2008 and rose to 16.9% in 2013. This time it got 31.9% and a near majority in the national assembly, with Khan looking set to become prime minister. The traditional parties of the Pakistani ruling class, the openly conservative Pakistan Muslim League and the...

A reply to some confused critics

Five Labour Party members have written an article ‘The AWL, Zionism and the struggle for equal rights in Israel/Palestine’ ( bit.ly/20ma0WX ) in which they accuse the AWL of being a “Zionist front organisation” outside the Palestinian solidarity movement (defined as being the PSC, BDS campaigns, Jewish Voice for Labour etc). They accuse us of “justifying settler colonialism” and justifying “apartheid”. They accuse “powerful” organisations such as Labour Friends of Israel as organising a witch-hunt in the Labour Party. These writers oppose a two-state settlement and seem to be for a single...

What Labour's code of conduct omits

Antisemitism, in Europe anyway, is thousands of years old, and has taken many different forms. Since the 19th century, it has a “left-wing” variant, in which anticapitalist feeling is directed against Jews as easily-targeted scapegoats for capitalism rather than, or as well as, against the impersonal and relatively-complicated real mechanisms of capitalist exploitation and oppression. The Stalin regime in the USSR coined (in 1949-53), and a range of groups self-defined as left-wing have promoted (especially since the 1970s), a new sub-variant, in which Israel is demonised as the world’s great...

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