Solidarity 109, 5 April 2007

Stop the deportations to Darfur!

By Amina Saddiq At the end of March, the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns reported that, across the country, the Home Office had accelerated its programme of rounding up and deporting Sudanese asylum-seekers, including people from war-ravaged and ethnically-cleansed Darfur. It is not just a question of people returning to Darfur itself. Many Darfuris (as well as other Sudanese) says that they will face death if they are returned to Sudan at all. Mohammed Abdulhadi Ali, a Darfuri asylum-seeker whose deportation was cancelled less than 24 hours before Solidarity went to press...

Solidarity 3/109 is out!

Download the pages, as pdfs, here (click on "read more"), or read it on this website by clicking here . Page 1 Stop the deportations to Darfur! Page 2 Climate change bill Ireland Migrant rights Page 3 Scotland: workers' unity first Back the Tube workers Page 4 BT Global jobs NUT conference PCS strikes Northern Ireland lecturers Unison NEC election Page 5 Vital weeks for McDonnell campaign Open letter to Socialist Party: do you support McDonnell? 3 May: support the SSP Is disaffiliation left-wing? Page 6 and Page 7 National Union of Students conference Racist Britain: old ideas, new forms Page...

Scotland: workers’ unity first!

According to the polls, the Scottish National Party is likely to become the biggest party in the Scottish parliament after the election on 3 May. Opinion polls also show 51% or 52% in Scotland for independence, and the SNP has pledged itself to a referendum on independence, in 2010 or 2011. It looks as if the rise of the SNP comes from the same sort of disillusion with Blair and Brown that is boosting Cameron’s Tories in England; in Scotland, the Tories come from too low a starting point to grab the benefits of that disillusion. The SNP has made much of its endorsement from former Royal Bank...

Back the Tube workers!

WHEN former CIA agent Bob Kiley ran London Underground, Ken Livingstone paid him £1 million a year. When he left his job, in addition to receiving a £2.5 million severance payment, and continuing to live rent-free in a £2.3 million house in Belgravia, Kiley continued to “work” as a part-time consultant for £737,000 a year. We say “work” not just because of his astronomically inflated salary, but because Kiley himself has now told the press: “I do very little work for my £737,000” (Evening Standard, 28 March). Kiley is an emblem, a symbol of how the Tube is managed under Ken Livingstone, and of...

The rise and rise of Ian Paisley

By Paddy Dollard A news item about a small event of great symbolic importance appeared in the Irish Times the other day. The long-time enemy of everything Papist, Republican, or Catholic Nationalist Irish, Ian Paisley, has ordered five cotton clerical shirts (£30 each) from a shirt-maker in the Republic of Ireland, in Donegal. A sign of the times? The agreement made on 26 March to form a joint Six Counties government by Paisleyites and Provisional Sinn Fein, the communal polar opposites of Northern Ireland politics for the better part of four decades, was expected. It was also surprising...

Mugabe’s despotism spirals to collapse - Support the workers in Zimbabwe!

by Sacha Ismail On Tuesday 3 April, trucks of riot police drove through the Zimbabwean capital Harare, and military helicopters hovered over workers’ districts, as a two day general strike called by the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions over wage rises and price increases — and against Robert Mugabe’s increasingly dictatorial regime — began. Soldiers with automatic weapons were posted at the intersections of the city's main industrial area. The strike, and the regime’s show of force against it, are the latest episode in the raging class struggle that has engulfed Zimbabwe since Mugabe’s...

Support Iranian teachers!

So the British sailors captured by the Iranian navy have now been released. Their capture was a deliberate provocation by the Iranian regime, possibly in part to distract from the working class struggle now gripping the country. For the last few weeks Iranian teachers have been protesting against poverty wages and poor conditions. Many thousands have taken to the streets or staged unofficial sit-in demonstrations in schools. They have risked their personal safety in acts of audacious solidarity against the Islamic regime. The teachers initially demanded negotiations with the government over...

Climate change bill won’t stop crisis

By Paul Vernadsky Hardly anyone now doubts the reality of global warming, that this is mainly the result of human productive activity and that if it continues unabated, both nature and human societies will suffer terrible destruction. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report published this week will further clarify the consequences of rising carbon emissions. Climate change encapsulates what Marx called the “metabolic rift” between humanity and nature — a rupture caused by the insatiable drive of capital for profit — a drive that knows no bounds and disregards ecological and...

No One is Illegal conference

Over one hundred socialists, trade unionists and anti-deporation activists attended the No One is Illegal trade union conference in Liverpool on 31 March. The day was spent discussing the politics of the fight against immigration controls and for migrant and refugee rights. This discussion — which was on the day was thoughtful, thorough and comradely — is vitally necessary as these issues are centrally important to the future of the labour movement. It would be a great step forward if a strong left-wing in the anti-deportation/asylum/migrant rights movement could be established. Two issues are...

World flowers - Rights for migrant workers

By a GMB organiser The Southampton migrant workers’ branch of the GMB has won union rights at UK’s largest cut flower packer — World Flowers Ltd. This comes after a six month campaign of direct action and sustained pressure on the employer. The flower packers at the company’s factory in Southampton are mainly Eastern European migrant workers. They have been working for the minimum wage, in very poor conditions, with no health and safety systems in place. The employer is a member of the Ethical Trading Initiative — it needs to be in order to trade with the UK’s largest supermarkets. But...

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