Solidarity 472, 6 June 2018

Before the Syrian civil war the Yarmouk district on the outskirts of Damascus was home to almost 150,000 registered Palestinian refugees. It was probably the largest and most well-developed refugee settlement in the world; it was certainly the biggest in Syria. In May 2018 the last Daesh fighters who had occupied the camp, along with other Syrian rebels, were driven out. The area now stands in ruins and is completely uninhabitable. There are plans for the complete redevelopment of southern Damascus, and the former camp residents may find themselves excluded. During the war the Syrian...

Victorian Socialists, an alliance of socialist groups and individuals, is mounting a serious attempt to win an upper house seat in the Victorian Parliament this November in Northern Metropolitan Melbourne. This is Australian Labor Party (ALP) heartland, increasingly contested by the Greens. In the Victorian multi-member upper house system, five Members of the Legislative Council are elected by preferential proportional representation, so Victorian Socialists will need 16.66% of the vote after preferences to get only the second outright socialist not in the ALP into any parliament in Australia...

We should welcome the opportunities Labour’s mooted National Education Service (NES) presents to transform education. One area that especially deserves attention is postgraduate and early career research. Graduate teaching assistants, hourly paid tutors, and other precarious education workers would benefit immediately from Labour’s policy commitments on workplace rights, including their commitments to repeal the 2016 Trade Union Act and to ban zero hours contracts. Nevertheless, abolishing tuition fees and providing maintenance grants at the postgraduate level can only go so far to provide...

Lush’s recent #SpyCops campaign showed exactly why it was needed this week, after off-duty and ex-duty police officers went in to stores to tell staff to take the publicity down. The high-street cosmetics company has, for a long time, supported various activist groups, including the Feminist Library and the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign. Last week, Lush announced it was giving its backing to Police Spies out of Lives (PSOOL) and the Campaign Opposing Police Surveillance (COPS). PSOOL and COPS are asking new Home Secretary Sajid Javid to change the current Public Inquiry into undercover...

Labour’s 13 point action plan to deal with antisemitism has been leaked to the Huffington Post. While it is welcome that the party wants a clear plan to tackle antisemitism, its apparent conclusions should be of concern to those of us who want to deal with antisemitism as a political problem. The plan includes a speeded up process for complaints, a smaller number of trained people to investigate, greater transparency over what is and will not be considered evidence. All of this is useful, but just a clearer disciplinary process will not deal with what is a political problem. We need much more...

Through all its confrontations with Catalan separatists, Spain has been under a minority government. On 1 June that political levitation act finally expired. Parliament voted no confidence in the conservative PP government of Mariano Rajoy. Through a never-tested-before provision of the 1978 Spanish constitution, the new government will be led by, and probably made up solely from, the PSOE, Spain’s social-democratic party, although it has only 84 seats in the 350-seat parliament. The new very-minority government will probably be forced into a general election soon. Realistically new prime...

February, one day after Nikolas Cruz committed a massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, police in Fair Haven, Vermont, received a tip from a friend of Jack Sawyer claiming that the 18-year old was planning a similar mass shooting at his former school. Sawyer was detained after an investigation revealed texts he’d sent speaking admiringly about the Parkland shooting, a journal indicating that he’d been thinking for months in disturbing detail about attacking former classmates at Fair Haven Union High as part of a “bigger and better” way of committing suicide, and...

Who are we? What are Workers' Liberty and Solidarity? We are a political strand in the flux of the broadly-Corbynite left, a flux which may be reshaping the left for a long period to come. We are the socialist, class-struggle, consistently-democratic, internationalist strand in the left. That is why we meet such hostility from the NGO-politics, Stalinistic or semi-Stalinist, bureaucratic, nationalistic, and "kitsch anti-imperialist" bloc. That small but vocal bloc represents the deadweight inflicted on the left in the Blair-Brown-Cameron decades, but with feet. In the first place, we are the...

Comment by a Workers' Liberty UCU member on UCU Congress can be read here. Jo Grady, UCU activist and Lecturer in Employment Relations at the University of Sheffield, spoke to Solidarity about the USS dispute, UCU Congress and where next? Solidarity: Where are things with USS at the moment? In April members of UCU voted to accept the offer that was on the table . This involved keeping the arrangements we currently have for the time being and installing a Joint Expert Panel (JEP) which has equal member representation from UCU and UUK. It was not entirely clear what the remit of that panel would...

The actions of full time officials of the UCU in walking out of the union's Congress is effectively a dispute with their own members. It is unprecedented in the history of British trade unionism and an abuse of trade union principles by the Unite branch to which UCU full-time officials, including General Secretary Sally Hunt, belong. The initial walkout was in response to a motion (B19), from the University of Sheffield branch, calling for the establishment of a democracy review within the union. This had originally been left off the order paper but when delegates voted to put it back on the...