Solidarity 228, 15 December 2011

By Cathy Nugent Last month the UN’s nuclear energy watchdog passed a resolution calling on Iran to come clean about whether or not it was developing nuclear weaponry. How has the left responded? Socialist Worker's (2 December) response: “Western powers, fresh from their intervention in Libya, are keen to assert themselves elsewhere.” Eh? Are western powers — the US, UK — really champing at the bit to go to war with Iran? Well, the same article concludes with words to the effect, “Not really”! So what is the fuss about? Clearly the US and others are “rattling sabres” at Iran. But the resolution...

Around 50 people attended a meeting held in Glasgow on 10 December to launch the Socialist Party’s latest Scottish electoral initiative: the Scottish Anti-Cuts Coalition (SACC). Of the first 15 speakers from the floor seven were members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), five were from the Socialist Party Scotland (SPS), and one each were members of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), the International Socialist Group (ISG) and the rump “Solidarity — Scotland’s Socialist Movement”. Clearly, the meeting was anything but a broad-based initiative to stand anti-cuts candidates in next May’s...

With less than a week to go to the close of voting in the Scottish Labour Party leader and deputy leader elections arch-Blairite MP and candidate for leader Tom Harris has conceded defeat. Given that he did not have the support of a single MSP, and the support of only one Constituency Labour Party (his own), Harris’s bid for the leader’s position was doomed from the outset. But in conceding defeat Harris has provided a timely reminder of the elitist, patronising and divorced-from-reality nature of the New Labour project. According to Harris, Party members in Scotland are simply too backward to...

Here’s a Christmas puzzle for Solidarity readers. Who is most confused and disoriented by David Cameron’s refusal to sign up for EU fiscal unity — the Daily Express and Mail or the Morning Star? The Express and Mail have been, as you might expect, fairly jubilant about Cameron’s willingness to isolate himself (or “stand up for Britain”, as they preferred to put it). The Express ran a poll which, in true Albanian style, had 99% of their readers backing Cameron. They quoted the aptly named Tory MP Peter Bone declaring that is was “Better to be a British bulldog than a Brussels poodle”. But...

By Hugh Edwards The sharp fall in the interest rate demanded of Italian debt on Monday 5 December signalled a malignant spirit of celebration in the international markets. Prime Minister Mario Monti’s government of “neutral technocrats” — some of them in tears just to prove it! — had done what they were asked to do: unload upon the backs of the Italian masses further massive cuts and reforms of 63 billion between now and 2014. Such is the price for the survival of both Italian capitalism, and the wider economic and financial community of the eurozone whose possible collapse would threaten the...

This time last year Workers’ Liberty was looking forward to the New Year, to moving into new offices, upping our pace and making Solidarity a weekly. In the past year Solidarity has been much more of an activist and organising tool for our ideas because of that. But for Solidarity to continue as a weekly, we need more money. If you think our ideas and the amplification Solidarity gives to those ideas in the working-class movement, are important then you should support us financially. Solidarity is not a generically socialist publication, arguing for lowest-common-denominator left politics. Our...

The Morning Star , the paper associated with the Communist Party of Britain, carried a naively self-revealing editorial on 9 December: “There’s a huge feeling of guilt and confusion when a leader writer in the Morning Star feels even a momentary twinge of fellow feeling with chief speculators’ stooge David Cameron...” Hadn’t Cameron done at least something good? He “refused to allow Britain to be sucked further into what amounted to a further consolidation of a European superstate...” The Star escaped its embarrassing alliance by reflecting that “Cameron remains wedded to Britain’s place in...

Europe is in crisis. And all the decisions about the crisis are being taken not by the people tormented, baffled, and troubled by it, but by a tiny elite of government leaders. Both the majority decision of the 9 December Euro-summit, and the veto stance of David Cameron, were irrelevant or harmful for the crisis. The leaders saw no way of dealing with the crisis other than to make the people pay, by cuts, or, for Cameron, cuts plus special protection for the bankers of the City of London. And no-one got a vote, except in the very indirect way of having voted in national elections from which...

By Paul Hampton Martyn Hudson’s latest letter ( Solidarity 227) only confirms my fear that he does not have a coherent assessment of the revolutionary workers’ regime in Russia in the early 1920s. Martyn says “we should not in 2011 still be firing our own metaphorical cannons into the garrison of Kronstadt. The Bolsheviks were wrong, understandably wrong, but wrong”. I disagree. I think the Bolsheviks had no choice but to suppress the rebels. The traditional Lenin-Trotsky defence of the suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny highlights the sailors’ mistaken programme, their social and political...

By Eric Lee In a recent interview for an Australian newspaper, the leader of the world’s trade union movement made an interesting observation. “Have progressive parties lost the narrative that connects them with working people in many countries?” asked Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). One would have expected a diplomatic answer — something along the lines of, well, it varies from country to country, clearly some labour and social democratic parties remain closer to their roots, and so on. But that is not what she said. Burrow, who chose...