Solidarity 437, 3 May 2017

Emmanuel Macron is facing a huge problem. The more voters see him, the less they like him. Macron’s performance since winning his place to second round of the French Presidential election has been catastrophic. Soon after winning 24% of the popular votes, Macron went to the very posh La Rotonde, a well-known restaurant in Paris, with his close friends and allies. Among them, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, soixante-huitard turned pillar of the Paris bien-pensant French liberals, and the pro-EU Jacques Attali, who believes that as long as him and his friends are living “la belle vie” nothing wrong can...

Scottish Labour candidates need to fight the forthcoming general election on the basis of policies which challenge the inequalities of wealth and power inherent in capitalism, and which will mobilise the labour movement not just to vote Labour but to fight for those policies whatever the outcome of the election. All Labour candidates throughout the UK should be campaigning on that basis. But the importance of such an election campaign is all the greater where specifically labour-movement and class-based politics have been squeezed out by competing nationalisms. And that is the case in Scotland...

The government’s free schools programme has been condemned as “incoherent and too often poor value for money” by MPs on the Public Accounts Committee. The committee’s recent report says that the Department for Education is spending “over the odds” on unsuitable sites and building free schools in areas where extra places are not always needed. On the other hand, 60% of state schools are more than forty years old and in need of essential repairs amounting to an estimated £7 billion. The Department of Education spent £863 million on 175 free school sites between 2011 and 2016. 24 of the sites...

A well organised coalition of aggrieved and right-leaning candidates prevailed against the left at this year’s conference of the National Union of Students (25-28 April). After three years of substantial shifts to the left on policy in the student movement, the mood of left delegates was, at times, one of exasperation and sadness. The political tone was set during the earliest debates, when liberal arguments for free education prevailed against left-wing counter-arguments. Conference was asked to vote for free education on the grounds that it would be “good for the economy” (i.e. big business)...

Jeremy Corbyn was attacked in the press last week for his refusal to talk about Syria at a press conference. He said he would address the issue in other interviews. Though the outrage was faux, Corbyn’s stance on Syria, and indeed Labour’s as a whole, is contradictory, unclear and tainted with the Stalinist complaisance towards Assad that infects the “anti-war movement”. In response to the US airstrikes and Boris Johnson’s commitment to help the US with further strikes, without a vote in Parliament, Corbyn called for a political solution: “Let’s get the Geneva process going quickly.” “In the...

On Wednesday 26 April, far-right French Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen tried to position herself as the candidate for working-class people by visiting the picket line of striking workers in Amiens, northern France. The strike is against the closure of a Whirlpool washing machine factory. Emmanuel Macron, the other presidential candidate had hoped to prove he understood the workers by meeting with union representatives; however he told them he wouldn’t keep the factory open if he won but would argue for “good terms for the closure”. On the other hand Le Pen said, “Everyone knows what side...

Despite international pressure, the detention and torture of suspected gay men by the Chechen government since late March has continued, and more secret concentration-camp style prisons have been discovered. A journalist who helped expose the brutal persecution has gone into hiding after threats from Chechen state officials and Chechen Muslim clerics. Putin and the Kremlin in Russia has been cynically turning a blind eye, and the Russian police have detained LGBT activists campaigning against this on May Day in St. Petersburg. But after international pressure the Kremlin reluctantly opened an...