Solidarity 119, 11 October 2007

Class Action -review of Michael Clayton

11 Oct 2007 |

Rosalind Robson

Michael Clayton (played by George Clooney) is “the fixer” for a top firm of New York lawyers. He’s the one that they ask to clean up the mess created by the crimes and misdemeanours of their corporate and millionaire clients. Or, to use the perjorative term he himself prefers in a moment of self-loathing, Clayton is a bag man. That puts him just above the hired assassin and dodgy accountant in the corporate food chain. Or, as his fellow lawyer and friend Arthur Edens says, Clayton is a bad man. And he is someone who has never let ethics get in the way of feeding an expensive gambling habit...

Bush ally threatens war on Iran.

11 Oct 2007 |

Martin Thomas

John Bolton, who was US ambassador to the United Nations until a few months ago, told a fringe meeting at Tory Party conference on 30 September: “I think we have to consider the use of military force [against Iran]. I think we have to look at a limited strike against their nuclear facilities.” According to the Guardian, Bolton added that: “If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change... The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back.” Bolton had been renominated by George W Bush for another...

A first in labour history

11 Oct 2007 |

Bruce Robinson

I HAVE been on many picket lines in my time, but until recently they have all taken place in the real world. 27 September saw the first ever strike and picket to take place in virtual reality. Second Life allows you to create a virtual person (or avatar) and go around doing the sorts of things you supposedly do in your normal life – like going on strike and picketing. Italian workers for the computer multinational IBM, members of the international union federation UNI, have been in dispute with their employers, who, after they demanded an increase in pay, responded by cutting their performance...

Solidarity 3/119 has gone to press

11 Oct 2007

Solidarity 3/119 has gone to press. Front page: "Post: the 'miners' strike' of our times". Back page: Stop repression in Burma; student bureaucrats move to smash democracy. Download here it as pdf (see "attachment") or read online .

Can the Scottish Socialist Party recover?

07 Oct 2007 |

Dale Street

Just nineteen motions have been submitted for the 2007 annual conference of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), being held in Dundee on 21 October. Four of the motions have been submitted by the party’s Executive Committee. The Republican Communist Network (RCN) platform in the SSP and the SSP Assistant Secretary (website) have each submitted one motion. The other thirteen motions have been submitted by eleven different SSP branches. That about sums up the sorry state that the SSP is in. And just over a third of the motions – seven of them – deal with the SSP’s internal organisation, covering...

The Unions after Bournemouth

03 Oct 2007

Even in 2005, Tony Blair’s Labour must have seemed to most voters at least marginally less illiberal and less rigidly attached to inequality than the Tory party of the old Thatcher minister Michael Howard. But what about now? Younger people, looking at the parties afresh, have nothing presented to them which makes Labour seem even demagogically more on the side of the “common people” than the Tories. Sometimes, indeed, the opposite. It has not always been so. The 1959 Labour Party manifesto was issued at a high point of “Butskellism” (the term was coined in 1954) and of the drive by the then...