Solidarity 089, 9 March 2006

The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority was set up by Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1964 on the classically Rousseauian bourgeois principle that the state is there to protect people from harm and if it fails to do so it should pay them money. Despite this and “award-capping” by the Tories in the 90s, not to mention gross inefficiency, it provides a lifeline to people hurt and disabled by crime. Now the government is proposing to overhaul the scheme. According to Home Office minister Fiona Mactaggart, the idea is to “create a structure to help people to survive and not spend the...

The Hazards Campaign, the trade union based health and safety watchdog, addressed a series of twenty freedom of information questions to the Health and Safety Executive at the beginning of this year. What they found is worrying. Far from enforcing safe working conditions in the country’s many hazardous workplaces, the HSE have discovered “deregulation” under government pressure and decided they like it. They want to reduce the “burden” of health and safety regulation on business, they explain. The next visit to your workplace may be from an HSE “adviser” rather than an inspector, as they are...

Last month New Labour’s latest privatisation, Qinetiq, was floated on the Stock Exchange. Qinetiq consists of most of the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Research Agency, all except the most “sensitive” areas — these were split off in 2001 to prepare for privatisation. Despite this precaution, “Qinetiq” still deals with some dangerous stuff, like anti-missile programmes and guided weapons. What is more, the privateers do not have the resources to safeguard their secrets; and they themselves warn that they may not be able to “deter misappropriation of its confidential information.” In other words...

David Broder, a former animal rights activist, assesses the the issues behind scientific (and not so scientific) tests on animals It’s no surprise that there are plenty of people who oppose Oxford University building animal testing labs. At a February 2005 High Court hearing, British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection activists claimed that at Cambridge, healthy and intelligent monkeys had the tops of their heads sawn off in order to induce strokes. After this ordeal, the monkeys were left without veterinary care for 15 hours, their brains exposed. Harrowing stuff. But the Research Defence...

Sacha Ismail spoke to Tom Ogg, an Oxford University student involved in Pro-Test, which campaigns in favour of animal testing for research and medical purposes. What is Pro-Test? The campaign was started by Laurie Pycroft, who’s a school student taking a year off from his A-Levels due to illness. Laurie set up a website, through which a number of university students got in touch with him; word got round on message boards, email lists and so on, and it went from there. That was when I got involved. Our main campaign is in support of a new biomedical research lab being built on South Parks Road...

As well as organising our own meetings, paper sales, discussions with people interested in our ideas and so on, and as well as our work in the trade unions, AWL also helps build campaigns with a more specific focus. One of the main ones we are engaged in at present is Iraq Union Solidarity. From immediately after the US/UK invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, AWL began to seek contacts and allies for the task of building a support network for the new Iraqi trade-union movement whose emergence we considered both likely, and essential if the peoples of Iraq were to assert their...