Solidarity 541, 31 March 2020

Diary of a Tube worker: "He's in his office and he tells us to go outside"

“I dunno man, it can’t be right. Look at how many the flu kills, there is something up here. Look at the new laws, black boys gonna lose their lives in jail and they can bury them, no questions”. E is holding forth in a control room that now has five of us in it. Two people could just about hope to be two metres away. At five it's an impossibility. I’ve signed in, I’m not happy about it. I've been reallocated to full-time station work from training for a driver's job, after working stations weekends on the Night Tube. I find others in similar positions in the mess room. “I haven’t worked here...

No coalition government!

The Guardian reports discussions among “senior Conservatives” about a national unity government or some other form of cross-party political collaboration during the Covid-19 crisis. It suggests there is widespread sympathy for this idea at the top of the Labour Party. Socialists should argue and rally the labour movement against it. Taking responsibility for the Tories’ policies is the opposite of what we need. According to the Guardian , the Tories arguing for a coalition or similar arrangement are quite open that they want this in order to benefit themselves. “One argument circulating among...

The $360 trillion

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash I was worried, like all the other people in the world, about the lack of treatment for this virus epidemic, so I asked the WHO [World Health Organisation] this question: “Do you have any global statistics on the lack of treatment, nurses, doctors, hospitals and medicine around the world, and how much funding is needed to overcome this epidemic?” WHO replied: “WHO has deployed technical support teams since the beginning of March to Iran and Italy to help local and national health authorities design mitigation policies and strategies, prepare and equip...

Rape as a weapon of war

Pietro da Corona's 17th century painting depicts "the rape of the Sabine women" by the early Roman armies. But rape in war is also much more modern. Christina Lamb has been a journalist reporting from war zones for over thirty years. Her book Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Has Done To Women , published by William Collins in 2020, traces the struggle to get rape recognised as a war crime. When Lamb began to submit copy to editors, telling the largely unreported evidence of survivors who told her their stories, her editors would reply that it would be too shocking for their readers to...

Robert Fine's "Cosmopolitanism"

The sociologist Robert Fine, who was a long-time sympathiser and sometime activist with Workers’ Liberty, passed away on 9 June 2018 at the age of 72. As our series of book reviews to commemorate his life illustrates, Fine dedicated his scholarship to many far-reaching topics in social and political theory. These topics include the rule of law, the anti-apartheid movement and independent trade unions in South Africa, racism and antisemitism, and the political thought of GWF Hegel, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt. Since Dale Street’s review in Solidarity #432 and Dan Davison’s tribute article in...

Hunger strike in Iran's jails

Above: Evin prison More than 100 political prisoners in Evin prison and the Greater Tehran Central Penitentiary (Fashafuyeh prison) have started a hunger strike demanding the release of political prisoners in the face of Coronavirus… While the Islamic regimes officials pocket billions, and still enjoy their luxurious life, ordinary people are suffering from sheer poverty and lack of medical care, and hospitals are in dire need of the most basic equipment. In prisons, the numbers of infected prisoners are on the rapid rise… The officials announced that they granted some temporary release to...

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