Solidarity 299, 9 October 2013

The Privy Council — an unelected body of medieval origin — will meet on Wednesday 30 October to see if it can modify the proposals for press regulation backed by the three big political parties and placate the big newspapers, most of whom backed a rival scheme already rejected by the Privy Council. The press lords want to retain the right to smear and lie without redress; but the proposed regulations include such things as making publications outside their framework (like Solidarity ) liable to worse penalties under Britain’s libel laws, which already do much to protect the rich from criticism...

Hamzah Khan’s death through starvation in 2009, the discovery of his mummified body two years later and the recent conviction of his mother, Amanda Hutton, has brought a horrific case of neglect and abuse to public attention. Judge Roger Thomas QC said it was “as bad a case of unlawful killing of a child by a parent as it is possible to imagine”. From what we know, Hamzah was starved to death by extreme neglect from his mother, who was his sole carer. At the time of his death in December 2009, the four year-old child was still wearing a size 6-9 month baby-gro and a nappy. His mummified...

Many young women attending secondary school will be aware of the almost fanatically zealous way schools pursue a particular aspect of the uniform policy: namely the length of the school skirt. Schools routinely rebuke pupils for any length deemed too short, remind us to check our skirts before going into assembly, and occasionally deliver an admonitory spiel with a threat of some form of sanction following. Usually this is done under the pretext that “male staff will feel uncomfortable” or even sometimes about how members of the general public feel about our attire. A cursory examination...

This summer marks the hundredth anniversary of the drafting of a letter which revealed one of history’s greatest secrets. Or maybe not. The letter in question is dated July 12, 1913 and is signed by Colonel Alexander Eremin, head of the Special Section of the tsarist Department of Police. Writing from the police headquarters in St. Petersburg, Eremin informs a captain in the distant Siberian town of Yeniseisk that one of the revolutionaries who has just been deported to his jurisdiction is, in fact, a former police collaborator. The agent’s name is Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili — better...

Finally the widespread phenomenon of zero hours contracts has broken into the national consciousness, with a lot of coverage in the media. Unite estimate as many as 5.5 million workers could be on such contracts, perhaps a fifth of the national workforce. Ed Miliband felt compelled to promise to ban certain types of zero hours contract in his speech to the TUC last month. Zero hours is so common in the service sector that it has become the norm in some chains; as much as 90% of the workforce in the case of Sports Direct. But it also afflicts other workplaces. Over 20,000 university staff are...

On Tuesday 1 October Silvio Berlusconi abandoned his threat to bring down the Italian government of Enrico Letta. The whoops of joy from the international bourgeoisie were nothing compared to the orgasm of triumph from their counterparts in Italy, finally reassured that the project begun around two years ago by Mario Monti to restore financial stability and competitive fitness would not be derailed by the desperate antics of a many-times-condemned billionaire criminal. Prime minister Letta, in his address to parliament on 1 October, offered up hosannas to the wonderful achievements of Monti —...

The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade unions (HKCTU) held a solidarity rally on 1 October at a Government office in Hong Kong. The demonstration called for the release of Wu Guijun, imprisoned for organising with co-workers against job losses when the furniture factory where they worked re-locates. According to the IUF trade union federation: “The workers downed tools on 7 May and petitioned the local government to intervene. On 23 May, 300 workers were besieged by the police while marching to the City Government; more than 20 workers were arrested and detained, including Wu Guijun. All were...

Thirty women asylum seekers from Pakistan and elsewhere have staged a hunger strike at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre against forced deportation. Some of the women were part of a group scheduled for removal from the UK on a charter flight to Lahore, Pakistan on 1 October. The Pakistani women were basing their asylum claim on gender-based persecution. A statement by 14 of the hunger strikers says: “We need justice, we need safety and we need protection. Women seeking asylum from gender violence, honour killing, forced marriage, domestic abuse, trafficking need time to prove their cases...

On 8 October English Defence League leaders Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll quit the EDL. Robinson said it was because of the “dangers of far-right extremism”. According to the EDL-watching website “EDL News”, this “signals the end of the EDL”. Unusually for a far-right group, the EDL has had no social programme and very little ongoing organisation. It has organised a series of street demonstrations, some fairly large, many small, often violent, since spring 2009. Nominally these are “against Islamic extremism”: in fact they are mostly mobilisations of gangs of football supporters who gather...

In recent months, a Facebook page with 25,000 followers has appeared under the title of the Palestinian Tamarod Movement. Tamarod (“rebellion” in Arabic) in Egypt collected more than 22 million signatures to oust Morsi. The Palestinian reimagining of this movement is creating a stir in the Gaza Strip by calling a day of protests against the Hamas government on 11 November. Tamarod activists have boldly distributed a statement of intent directly to the homes of some Hamas leaders, taking to the streets in the early hours to avoid arrest. They have even emblazoned expressions of solidarity on...