Solidarity 561, 2 September 2020

Rebuilding Momentum groups

Roxana Fraser, an activist in the Southampton Momentum group, talked with Cathy Nugent from Solidarity . Our group has been and remains well functioning — we’ve been meeting online regularly during lockdown. We have been in touch with other local groups. It is important right now for groups to invite others to meetings and so on. In my experience there was very little support for local groups after the early days of Momentum. All the focus was on helping Labour to win elections and fighting the internal battles in Labour. But local groups should be doing a lot more. We’ve organised a lot of...

"Pathetic clowns, lousy Trotskyists": The Left responds to a solidarity campaign with Belarus

In late August, at the request of independent trade unions in Belarus and supported by global union federations, LabourStart launched a campaign demanding an end to state repression in that country. The campaign title was “Stop the violence — defend democracy and human rights”. In a mass mailing to trade union activists, we summarised what had happened in Belarus, noting that “a wave of spontaneous work stoppages swept across the country. Workers started to form strike committees to prepare for a nationwide general strike in support of democratic change.” Our message quoted from some of the...

Trumpism in vigilante mode

It was only a matter of time before a white supremacist vigilante murdered opponents of Donald Trump. The surprise was that it hadn’t happened sooner. There will be more of this in the run-up to the Presidential election. This fresh outrage in the Wisconsin town of Kenosha followed days of protest after local police shot unarmed black man Jacob Blake seven times in the back. 17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse (above, left), a keen attender of Trump rallies, answered the call of a vigilante website and his mother drove him and his illegally owned AR-15 rifle twenty miles across the state line to...

"Battersea versus the British Empire"

This is part two of a series. For the other articles, see here . Buy our pamphlet on Saklatvala here . In 1921, aged 47, after 16 years in the UK, Shapurji Saklatvala was selected as Labour’s Parliamentary candidate for Battersea North. This came shortly after his very public decision to leave the Independent Labour Party and join the Communist Party of Great Britain. He would become both Labour's first "BAME" MP and one of Britain's first avowedly revolutionary socialist MPs. How did these things fit together? Communists and Labour Saklatvala had become active in the London Labour Party in...

Unison: break from "plan to lose"!

Local government members in the big public-services union Unison have voted two to one (66%) in favour of the 2020-21 pay award, in a ballot closing 11 August. The union’s national joint council committee accepted the offer from employers of 2.75%, though, it said, “it fell far short of the 10% claim and did not properly reward key workers for their exceptional contributions throughout the pandemic”. The pay award fell even further short of the 22% our union had explained we have lost over the last ten years. We are one of the unions representing care workers, school support staff, early years...

Putin's poisoners strike again

The great revolutionary Leon Trotsky was assassinated on 21 August 1940 by an agent of the Stalinist regime. Almost to the day, 80 years later came an attempted assassination of Alexei Navalny, a leading anti corruption activist and critic of Putin. The intended method of dispatch these days is not an ice pick or a gun, but some form of poison. The intention of the exercise remains the same though - elimination of all opposition to a corrupt police-state regime. Although property relation have undergone change since the fall of the USSR thirty years ago and the country purports to be some form...

Diary of an engineer: "Thank you for all your hard work"

For this entry, I’m going to quote the letter I received this week — I hope you find it as entertaining as I did. A caveat: compared to millions of people my working conditions and pay during the pandemic have been extremely good. I consider myself very lucky not be self-employed, unemployed, shielding, or forced to work while sick, among many other abuses and insults that have been inflicted on our class. This corporate letter is absurd, but it is at least a pretence at courtesy and recognition. *** Dear… In recent months the teamwork and commitment you have shown towards Veolia’s mission of...

Deliveroo: more action

On Wednesday 26 August, Deliveroo couriers continued their organising drive in Sheffield by organising a boycott of the Mr Miyagi sushi restaurant. Mr Miyagi had become a byword for disrespect among drivers in Sheffield. They would use the Deliveroo app to oblige drivers to turn up at the restaurant long before the food was prepared. Drivers had to wait a long time for food orders — time for which they were not paid — and run the risk of getting parking tickets, or be subject to complaints from impatient customers. Mr Miyagi’s owner received a letter from the union outlining these concerns...

Tube: an alternative to cuts

As well as a loud “no” to cuts proposed by the ongoing KPMG-led audit of Transport for London’s finances, Tube workers and our unions also need to spell out our “yes”. We’re unlikely to get that kind of vision from the “independent review” London Mayor Sadiq Khan has commissioned to run in parallel. RMT has produced its own submission to the TfL review, making the case for public funding, public ownership, increased staffing levels, and the in-housing of all services. It’s a useful contribution to discussion, but needs to be connected to an active campaign with roots in workplaces. It also...

Action on jobs and re-opening (John Moloney's column)

Strikes to resist job cuts by our members at Tate galleries are continuing. I attended picket lines on 28 and 29 August. Tate bosses have now identified the workers whose jobs they intend to cut, cruelly doing so by sending out emails late at night on Friday 28th. Meanwhile, Tate is advertising for new jobs and is still recruiting staff! We’re therefore demanding that the workers facing redundancy be reallocated to the positions for which Tate is now recruiting. We’ll begin a ballot of our members at London’s Southbank Centre, also over job cuts, on 1 September. Bosses there have extended the...

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