Solidarity 330, 4 July 2014

The public sector strike on 10 July will be the biggest strike in Britain since the November 2011 strike over attacks to public sector pensions. Well over one million workers could take part. At the heart of the dispute is the low pay epidemic which afflicts millions of workers in Britain. According to research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the cost of maintaining a decent standard of living in the UK has increased by 46% since 2008, while wages have only increased by 9%. A couple with children now need to earn £40,574 to maintain a minimum standard of living, compared to less than £28...

The phone hacking trial, which concluded just over a week ago, was the longest trial in recent legal history. There were seven months of hearings, 42,000 pages of evidence from the CPS, twelve defendants and crimes investigated over a ten year period. It exposed corruption and criminality at the heart of the bourgeois press. The estimated amount spent by the defence on out-of-court settlements and legal fees of former employees of News International varies — but some have put it as high as £1 billion. Rupert Murdoch funded the defences of former editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks (who was...

As war rages in Iraq and Syria, the threat of a return to open war in Israel-Palestine is also increasing. Three teenage Israeli settlers disappeared in the West Bank on 12 June, and on 30 June were found murdered. The Israeli government’s typical hyper-response has included raiding thousands of homes in the West Bank, arresting 570 Palestinians and killing several (5 by one report, 10 by another) in the process. 34 bombing raids on Gaza on 1 July injured 11 people. Israeli government ministers have threatened more of the same. On 2 July a Palestinian teenager was murdered in East Jerusalem...

On 3 July a parliamentary committee reported that “Female genital mutilation is an ongoing national scandal which is likely to have resulted in the preventable mutilation of thousands of girls to whom the state owed a duty of care”. There has long been law against doctors and parents who are party to mutilation of young girls’ genitals. But the committee still found a “growing prevalence of FGM”. Its recommendations include: • Failure to report female genital mutilation should be made a criminal offence if reporting of the practice does not increase in the next 12 months • Headteachers and...

An English Defence League “national demonstration” of around 200 marched through Middlesbrough on Saturday 28 June. A counter-demonstration of 250 assembled before their march, took a route through the centre of town and heard speeches from trade unionists, black community activists and local anti-fascists. The response was organised by Teesside Solidarity Movement through a series of democratic and open co-ordinations. This marks further breaks from the Unite Against Fascism model of doing anti-fascist activity in the North East. In Newcastle, anti-fascist marches are held under the banner of...

Service users protesting at the closure of a mental health drop in centre have had a victory after four months in occupation. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust had previously tried to close the Lifeworks centre in favour of a countywide service, which would force all patients back to their GP and through a series of assessments without any support available. Management have agreed to keep the Lifeworks centre open for five years, with hospital transport for those that require it and the open clinic being open two days a week. The chairman of the county council's health...

When I was growing up, I remember being really confused about why some people had loads and other people didn’t. It seemed really unfair that I was well fed, clothed and schooled while other children didn’t go to school, or had to work, or went to bed hungry. I grew up in a really middle-class environment, and a lot of what some people said made me angry. When I was about eight, I said that people should be made to give up their wealth. Some adults would just scoff, or laugh at me, or say I would change my mind as I got older. I may only be twenty-five — but I haven’t yet changed my mind about...

The election of Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the biggest political shift in Indian politics since 1947 and spells danger for Indian workers, women and ethnic and religious minorities. It is the first time a party has won more votes than the Nehru-Gandhi Congress Party. On a high turnout of 66%, the BJP got 31% to the Congress Party’s 19%, picking up 282 of the 543 seats in the lower house. This gives them a parliamentary majority, and an even bigger one if they can count on the support of the rest of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance of centre-right and right...

On 20 June Petro Poroshenko, the recently elected President of Ukraine, announced a 15-point peace plan. This included a seven-day ceasefire in the fighting in the south-east of the country, subsequently extended for another three days. On Monday 30 June Poroshenko called off the ceasefire. In the course of this ceasefire separatists had carried out 108 attacks, killing 27 Ukrainian soldiers and wounding another 69. It seems that Poroshenko had hoped that the European Union would pressurise Putin into pressuring the more politically-minded elements amongst the separatists into pressurising the...

In the twenty or thirty years before World War One, mass socialist and trade union movements were built across Europe, starting off very small in the 1880s and acquiring such strength by, say, 1905 that most of their activists believed that they would soon be able to overthrow capitalism. That inspiring advance came to a sudden end in early August 1914. With the start of World War One, most of the big socialist and trade-union movements rallied behind their own bourgeois governments. A permanent line of division was drawn in the labour movement, and remains to this day, between the...