Solidarity 429, 8 February 2017

In Solidarity 428 “Copeland, Corbyn, and the future of nuclear”, Luke Hardy reminds us that “socialists should deal with facts”. True, but socialists should deal with all the relevant facts; and in the case of nuclear power, some facts point in one direction, others in another. Hardy highlights many important points, but overlooks other crucial facts. It is simply not true that we cannot meet our energy needs with green and renewable energy generation, and without nuclear. Reports have been made that detail exactly how it can be done . “Smart grid” technology significantly reduces the baseline...

Christine Shawcroft’s article 'Just a Mo(mentum)!' in the latest issue of Labour Briefing (the “original” Briefing , not the magazine of the same name put out by the LRC) is the first and only attempt to give political justification for the coup on 10 January in which a few people round the Momentum office declared all the organisation’s democratic structures abolished. The coup-makers also imposed a new constitution in which Momentum members are now voting (through a voting system which enables the largest minority to sweep the board) only for 12 out of 28 or 32 places on a committee which...

A report by Amnesty International released on 7 February 2017 says that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were murdered in a secret prison in Syria from 2011 to 2016. Inmates at the prison were mostly civilians who supported the opposition to President Bashar al Assad. The information comes from interviews with 84 people who were former prisoners, guards, judges and doctors. The report describes killing and torture on an industrial scale, “trials” lasting between one and three minutes, mass hangings of between 50 and 80 people that took place twice a week. The hangings were conducted extremely...

The attempts by the Romanian government to weaken anti-corruption laws have been pushed back by mass protests. A proposed decree would have lifted criminal sanctions from public officials including MPs who benefitted from abuse of office, if their gains were less than 200,000 Romanian leu (£38,000). The government said this was necessary to comply with anti-corruption court rulings. Opponents believe this will just legalise corruption up to that level. Romania is ranked as the fifth most corrupt country in the EU. The Chief Prosecutor told the Financial Times that had the decree been passed...

Milo Yiannopoulos is an editor at Breitbart, a news site of the so-called alt-right. He is a self-described “super villain”, a viciously right-wing internet troll who publicly attacks women, black people, Muslims, immigrants. Unsurprisingly he is a great supporter of Donald Trump. So bad is he, he is permanently banned from Twitter. He is currently making a hugely controversial speaker tour, and hit the mainstream news when his planned appearance at UC Berkeley was cancelled due to the protests against it. There is now a debate on whether this cancellation was an attack on free speech. The alt...

At a recent LGBT History Month event, Jeremy Corbyn said that “Our defence of you is a defence of all of humanity and the right of people to practise the life they want to practise, rather than be criminalised, brutalised and murdered, simply because they chose to be gay, they chose to be lesbian, they were LGBT in any form.” News outlets described this as a “gaffe” with some getting up in arms about the idea of homosexuality being a “choice” rather than something people are born with. There is not enough scientific evidence either way regarding whether being homosexuality is something we are...

I was born in a steel town – Stocksbridge, about 9 miles west of Sheffield. The steelworks were huge and employed at its peak 6,500 workers. The sirens which marked the start and end of shifts, the roar of furnaces, the clanging of shunting trains and machinery, were constant background noise to my early years. However, as the poet W H Auden once wrote, “The past is another country”. On my infrequent returns to my birthplace I am always struck by how the place has changed. An eerie quiet hangs over everything now, and the river, which once had the colour of oxtail soup and an indescribably...

On Wednesday 8 February, just after Solidarity has gone to press, Parliament will vote on the third reading of the Tories’ Brexit bill. On 7 February the Tories said that, yes, Parliament can vote on whatever deal they come up — but only between that and what no MP will support, quitting the EU without a deal, i.e. having no closer arrangement with Europe than with Afghanistan or Zimbabwe. Citing the 23 June referendum as their authority, the Tories now claim the right to shape Brexit their way, above and outside all democratic control. Yet Jeremy Corbyn and the leadership of the Labour Party...