Left groups and people

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

The return of old formulas

More debate on the right of return here. There are about 13 million Palestinians across the world. They do not have a state of their own. They are disadvantaged in all the countries where they are mainly concentrated, though in different ways from country to country. About 2.9 million live in the West Bank, mostly in over 160 patches of land where the Palestinian Authority has limited autonomous powers of administration (mostly to hand out foreign aid money and jobs), but which are hemmed in and dominated by a surrounding Israeli military presence. About 2 million are in Gaza, which is...

The development of Workers’ Liberty’s ideas on Israel and Palestine

Here I will give a brief account of the evolution of the ideas of what is now AWL on the Israeli-Arab conflict, and of those of us whose ideas these were. Before Stalinism replaced communism, communists rejected the Zionist project on three main grounds. It was a "utopian nationalism". It misdirected Jews away from the class struggle in the countries in which they lived. Its goal could be achieved, if at all, only in collaboration with the British (League of Nations mandate) authorities in Palestine, and by siding with Britain against the Arabs. (Britain occupied the territory, formerly part...

Laura Murray and complaints

The appointment (on 25 April) of Laura Murray to Head of Complaints for the Labour Party has real problems, whatever merits she may have. Murray has been defended by Jon Lansman, chair of Momentum: “I can’t think of anyone better for this role. She’s developed wide knowledge about it [antisemitism], deeply wants to root it out, has engaged and worked with Jewish communities”. Jeremy Newmark, former chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, has described her as “responsible and fair”, and defended her against charges that, intervening from a position in the Leader’s Office, she pressed complaints...

The pro-Farage “left”

On 17 April, George Galloway declared his support for Nigel Farage and his newly formed Brexit Party. Farage is a former Tory, then Ukip leader. He is vehemently anti-migrant. He has called for the NHS to be replaced by “social insurance”, for laws against discrimination at work to be repealed, and for millions of public sector jobs to be cut. Claire Fox, Alka Sehgal Cuthburt, and James Heartfield have been announced as Farage party candidates. They are figures round the online magazine Spiked!, the “legacy” operation of the “Revolutionary Communist Party” of 1978-97. Frank Furedi, the best...

ISO: the picture from Chicago

On 19 April, the International Socialist Organization (ISO), previously the largest far-left group in the US, announced it had completed the process of winding itself up. The decision to dissolve came in the wake of a major controversy over the ISO Steering Committee’s mishandling of a sexual assault allegation in 2013. The row began on 15 March with the publication of a letter from the new ISO Steering Committee elected at the organisation’s national conference in late February. The echoes with the 2013 “Comrade Delta” scandal that led to mass departures from the SWP are difficult to ignore...

Jackie Walker: the curtain comes down

On 27 March, Jackie Walker was expelled from the Labour Party. Her case had been running for three years, since she was first suspended from the Labour Party in May 2016. Back in 2016, we opposed her suspension – for remarks which surely had antisemitic connotations, but were offhand fragments from social media and meetings – though we supported her removal from the position of vice-chair of the Labour left group Momentum. Walker eventually got her case heard by a National Constitutional Committee panel whose members, on their records, were neither right-wing nor likely to be unreceptive to a...

Why has the ISO collapsed?

On our last count, Stephen Wood’s piece on the collapse of the USA’s International Socialist Organization was the most-read of Solidarity’s articles on our website. In the next issue of Solidarity we hope to have further coverage from one of our people who is in Chicago for a while, and will have a chance to talk face-to-face with ex-ISOers and other left-wingers who’ve been able to observe the ISO up close. Chicago was the ISO’s main base. As yet, there are many questions about the ISO collapse to which we can’t even guess answers. It’s a strange business. The French Trotskyist group which is...

Full Brexit: "Transforming Britain"

George Hoare, Peter Ramsay, Lee Jones, Anshu Srivastava and Danny Nicol respond to criticisms of the London Full Brexit event from some on the left. We reply to this article here. Full Brexit co-organised the Transforming Britain After Brexit tour because we wanted to open up a space for discussion, within and beyond the Left, over Brexit and the nature of the European Union. In March we held events in Coventry, Manchester, Liverpool, and London, with an event in Durham to come next month and hopefully more dates in cities across the UK after that. We believe that the EU is undemocratic in its...

A bridge to the far right

This is a reply to a Full Brexit article. The “Full Brexit” project describes itself as a network of “activists, academics, journalists and policy experts, all on the broad political left” dedicated to “seizing the historic opportunity Brexit offers for restoring popular sovereignty, repairing democracy, and renewing our economy”. Its list of founding signatures includes Paul Embery (of the Arron Banks-funded Trade Unionists Against the EU group who recently spoke at Nigel Farage’s Brexit rally) and Maurice Glasman (of Blue Labour, slogan “Faith, Family and Flag”). On 25 March, these policy...

Algeria: "down with the system"

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...

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