Left groups and people

Consider Ken Livingstone and the Labour Party, Al Capone and the US government. They jailed Alphonse Capone, a multiple-murderer gangster, for tax evasion. That was odd, but I think it better they got him for that than that they didn’t get him at all. So with Ken Livingstone’s separation from the Labour Party on antisemitism. Livingstone has for nearly four decades been a public purveyor of political antisemitism. Here I want to consider how serious antisemitism has spread into the Labour Party by way of the ostensibly revolutionary left — the WRP and the SWP — and their ex-members migrating...

Aaron Bastani, co-founder of online news platform Novara Media, has responded to an article in the Guardian on 26 May about calls for a debate on Brexit at the 2018 Labour conference... by trying to witch-hunt the AWL. The article quotes three anti-Brexit Momentum members in support of the call for a debate. On Twitter Bastani accuses the AWL of being behind a “plot” with the Labour right to destabilise the Corbyn leadership through a debate on Brexit policy. To build up his ludicrous picture of an AWL plot, Bastani says Rida Vaquas, one of the activists quoted in the Guardian , is a member of...

The decision of the Labour Representation Committee, Grassroots Black Left and Red Labour to challenge the official Centre Left Grassroots Alliance slate for Labour’s National Executive is a tactical mistake. We agree with these comrades that the method selection for the CLGA slate has been opaque for some time. It is unclear how groups are able to be involved and level of control they then have over the agreed candidates once in office. The decision of Momentum to unilaterally declare their full slate and push that through the CLGA is also unwelcome. However, with only a short time left to...

An open letter to Ashok Kumar It’s been said before, and it will bear saying again. If everything published by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in the last five decades were to disappear, and if future historians of socialism had to rely on what our political opponents said about us, then the historians would find it impossible to make political sense of the story. On the one hand we are people who do, and have always done, everything we can to help workers in their struggle against employers and governments. We throw everything we have into that. We preach working-class revolutionary...

The 17 February meeting of the Labour Party National Policy Forum (NPF) saw a row over electing a new chair. Created as part of the Blairite process of blocking internal democracy, the NPF substitutes itself for the fully demonstratic policy-making conference that is needed. Abolition of the NPF as one of the aims of the democracy review would be a welcome step. So what was the row? Former National Executive Disputes Committee Chair, and previous member of the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance slate for the NEC, Ann Black looked like she had the votes in the room to become the chair of the NPF...

Momentum has proposed a slate for the elections to the constituency section of Labour’s National Executive, to be held this summer. As we understand it, this slate has also been (narrowly) approved by the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance. The first-time additions of Ann Henderson, Huda Elmi and Nav Mishra to the slate do make it the most diverse it has ever been. However, not everyone is happy. The departure of Rhea Wolfson and Christine Shawcroft, possibly to help them secure parliamentary seats is regrettable. Christine Shawcroft is a long-standing activist on the Labour left, has regularly...

Moran Shirin of the Iranian Revolutionary Marxist Tendency spoke to Solidarity . There were many workers’ protests on Sunday-Monday, 7-8 January. Mostly they’ve been about unpaid wages. These include: Haft Tapeh sugar cane workers; Khalij-e Fars Transport (2-4 months of unpaid wages); Phases 22 and 24 of the South Pars gas field development in Asaluyeh (temporary contract workers have not been paid for six months). Zar Shooran gold miners have not been paid since November. Tabas council has not paid its workers for three months. Ghaemshahr Textiles workers have just had some of their three...

On 22 December, US President Donald Trump passed the most significant piece of domestic legislation of his term thus far, the so-called “Tax Cuts and Job Act”. This tax reform, one of the most sweeping in decades, will cut corporate tax by 15%. The package also includes measures such as lowering taxes on overseas profits. The BBC’s summary of the act was to the point: “The tax reform is good news for businesses, particularly multinational corporations and the commercial property industry. The extremely wealthy and parents sending their children to private schools are set to benefit.” This...

To download this as a pdf click here During the night of 8/9 November 1969 monuments in West Berlin commemorating victims of Nazi persecution, including one marking the destruction of a synagogue in the city’s Schoneberg district, were vandalised. “Shalom”, “El Fatah” and “Napalm” were painted on the monuments, in the colours of the Palestinian national flag. On 9 November itself a member of the “Black Rats, Tupamaros West Berlin” planted an incendiary device in the city’s Jewish Community Centre, timed to ignite when the annual commemoration of “Kristallnacht” took place in the grounds of the...