Solidarity 127, 21 February 2008

Remploy strike against closures

In a shocking example of its free-market savagery, the Government is closing 28 of the 83 Remploy factories, which employ disabled workers to make work-wear products in a unionised workplace with union-agreed terms and conditions and rates of pay. Meanwhile, it is outsourcing more and more work, putting up “for sale” signs at factories not yet closed and using “modernisation” funds to push for voluntary redundancies at the factories that are remaining open. On 6 and 7 February, workers at the Remploy factories in Birkenhead and Aintree went on strike against the redundancies; on 13 and 14...

Stop Rolls-Royce closure on Merseyside!

Hundreds of Rolls-Royce workers and their supporters marched through Liverpool on 8 February to protest against the company’s plans to close its plant in Bootle and transfer the work to the US, with the loss of 200 jobs. The Bootle workers were joined by solidarity delegations from other Rolls Royce plants including Bristol and Derby. The plans for the closure come shortly after Rolls Royce announced £800 million in profits, up by 13% from £705 million in 2007, and promised its shareholders a 35% increase in pay outs. The protest in Liverpool was addressed by Tony Woodley - whose record of...

Iran’s new left

The last two years have seen an upsurge of the Iranian student movement — and a sharp turn to the left, as more and more student radicals become influenced by Marxism. Since December, the Iranian government has arrested dozens of socialist students for attempting to organise demonstrations. Laura Schwartz, Sacha Ismail and Sofie Buckland spoke to Azadeh and Kave , two activists now living in London who were until recently active at Tehran University. Kave: The British left seems to be in a horrible state. There are so many groups, and many of them are soft on political Islam, on Hizbollah...

A new opposition in Zimbabwe

On 8-9 February 2008, over 3,000 delegates from fifty civic groups, social movements, trade unions and the revolutionary left gathered in Harare. The delegates, including 300 from the International Socialist Organisation and its allies, were at a convention entitled: “Reclaiming Our Future, Deciding Zimbabwe’s Destiny.” The People’s Convention was following up the All-Stakeholders Conference held in Bulawayo on 29 September 2007 which had rejected the secretive and exclusive Mbeki-mediated talks on Zimbabwe’s future. A National Task Force was set up to meet the Movement for Democratic Change...

Taslima Nasrin threatened

In India the liberal feminist Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin is being threatened with expulsion from India in the aftermath of Islamist protests against her criticisms of religious fundamentalism. After violent demonstrations in November the writer, who recently released a new book Women Have No Country, was rushed out of her home in Kolkata (Calcutta), then taken to Rajasthan and finally a safe house in New Delhi, to which she is not allowed to invite visitors. Nasrin has angrily criticised her treatment by the Indian government – not only have they locked her away under pressure from...

More than an apology needed

Kevin Rudd, the Blair-model new Labor prime minister of Australia, has made the long-awaited official apology from Australia’s government to the country’s Aboriginal peoples for mistreatment over the centuries. Sam Watson, a Murri activist in Brisbane and a member of the Socialist Alliance, has commented: “I propose that there should be a national monument erected in front of Parliament House to honor the victims... “Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Aboriginal Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin still haven’t made any attempt to meet with the genuine leaders of the Aboriginal community. We endorse...

Reinstate Orlando Chirino!

The campaign to defend sacked Venezuelan trade union leader Orlando Chirino is gathering momentum within the country as well as internationally. Click here for model motion A national coordinator of the National Union of Workers (UNT) and an elected official in the oil industry union Sinutrapetrol, Chirino was sacked from his job in the state-owned oil company PDVSA at the end of last year. Chirino argues that this is an act of “discrimination and political persecution” and that the decision to sack him was based on his opposition to President Chavez’s proposed constitutional reforms at the...

Cuba after Fidel: what next?

The Chinese road? Samuel Farber, Cuban “Third Camp” Marxist and author of The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered, was interviewed about the book in US socialist journal Against the Current (November 2006) . Here we reprint an extract with his predictions for Cuba without Castro. More on this site about Cuba . There are many indications of Raúl Castro’s outright support for China’s direction. Visiting Shanghai in April 2005, Raúl said: "There are people who are worried about the Chinese model — I’m not; China today proves another world is possible". I find this comment obscene, in...

Unexpected results in Pakistan election

The tumultuous political scene in Pakistan, took an unexpected turn on 18 February, when President Musharaf’s political party Pakistan Muslim League ‘Q’ took a battering in the general election. As we go to press, unofficial results show the Pakistan People’s Party, the party of assassinated ex-prime minster Benazir Bhutto, has won 86 seats out of 256 National Assembly seats. The PPP won a clear majority in the southern province of Sindh and have enough seats to rule the federal government there. In the populous province of Punjab, Pakistan Muslim League-N led by Nawaz Sharif, the former Prime...

Lebanon needs a left independent of Hezbollah

Seven people were killed on 27 January as the Lebanese army clashed with rioters in southern Beirut in the wake of a Shia demonstration. The incident has drawn the army into Lebanon’s political crisis, which has seen three months of impasse as parties close to PM Fouad Siniora squabble with Syrian-backed parties such as Amal and Hezbollah over the election of a new president. The 27 January demonstration in Mar Makhaeil was called to protest about the chronic power cuts which take place in predominantly Shia districts of the Lebanese capital. The army attempted to break up the demonstration...

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