Solidarity 467, 25 April 2018

Equal rights for migrants!

The unfolding scandal of the denial of health and social care to the now-aged children of the Windrush is a warning sign. It shows the sharp end of government racism, and the immense store of racist malice that the British ruling class is capable of unleashing on any group of foreign-born people it chooses. It is the fruit of years of right wing demagogy, in the press and in government, against migrants. However, it is only the tip of the iceberg — and unless the left and the labour movement rally to defeat the Tory government and Brexit, more is to come. It was in 2012 when then-Home...

Momentum left resists drive to purge

On Monday 23 April the Momentum group in Lewisham (south London) held its Annual General Meeting to elect a new set of officers and plan future work. Up to 160 people turned up. Around 30 people were not able to get into the venue as it was full to capacity, and therefore were excluded from the discussions. Maybe 60-70 had no previous record of local activity in Momentum or the Labour Party, and/or had been mobilised simply to vote out members of the existing steering group who were standing again for different roles, and specifically members of the AWL, which for months now has been the...

Brexit is more and more troubled

The House of Commons will vote soon on a proposal for Britain to stay in a customs union with the EU after Brexit. On 18 May, the House of Lords defeated the Government on that issue, voting through a recommendation that ministers take steps to negotiate a new customs union with the EU. On Monday 23rd, the Government declared: “We will not be staying in the customs union or joining a customs union”. Pro-customs-union Tory MPs may blink, faced with the prospect of the Government being defeated, but it will only take a few Tory rebels to defeat Theresa May’s administration. The EU’s Customs...

Syria, Chemical weapons, and bombing

On 14 April the USA, Britain, and France made air-strikes which, so the US says, disabled some of the Syrian government’s chemical-weapons sites. US Defence Secretary James Mattis described the operation as a “one-off”, and in fact further substantial military action by the USA and its allies seems unlikely in the near future in Syria, where Russia, Iran, the Assad government which Russia and Iran support, and Turkey in some areas, control most of the territory ( bit.ly/syria-t ). The Russian government, which vehemently condemned the air-strikes, made no charges about civilian casualties from...

Food delivery workers unite across Italy

On Sunday 15 April in Bologna the first national assembly of food delivery workers took place. Organised by the “Riders’ Union Bologna”, it drew delegates from nearly all of the largest cities as well as delegates from similar collectives in Belgium and France; and from Italy, observers came from the main trade unions, federal and otherwise. The initiative was the culmination of a series of actions involving militants from Bologna over the last 18 months, collectively addressing the needs of the thousands of workers in the gig economy increasingly at the mercy of the multinational corporate...

Protest Trump on 14 July

In January 2018, US President Donald Trump cancelled a planned trip to the UK. His stated reason was that the famously unsuccessful realtor didn’t fancy the “off-location” US Embassy. But the real reason was almost certainly that Trump wanted to duck the huge wave of protest that anyone could see would meet any visit. The racist, authoritarian and climate-change-denying policies of the Trump administration stoked a storm of indignation and a series of huge rallies at the very suggestion of his visit. In mid-April 2018, Trump announced a new trip to the UK, for a “working meeting” with Theresa...

How the ground was laid for Enoch Powell

Last week saw the fiftieth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s “River of Blood” speech”. The contents of the speech are well known, arguing that black and Asian people were an immutable and alien pollutant in Britain and that immigration should be stopped and reversed through repatriation. The speech’s classicism sounds odd today, but it was a highly functional mask of over-educated respectability which barely concealed its main content — vernacular racism. Powell alternated between allusions to ancient Greek history and vox populi stories purportedly from people in his constituency. These stories...

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