Solidarity 473, 22 June 2018

Building the ‘Left Against Brexit’

The Left Against Brexit is an initiative that seeks to take back what should be the common-sense left wing position on Brexit, and stand out from the more centrist establishment anti-Brexit campaigns. David Miliband may believe speaking out with Nicky Morgan and Nick Clegg from a rice factory will do the trick. We don’t. The left has slipped back on its ideas around the EU since the referendum. A lot of the left and not just in the Labour Party, is of the view that is it better to keep your head down and hope for a Labour government to sort it out. I think that is totally misplaced for a...

The four Bastanis and the EU

The commentator Aaron Bastani, who has gained some profile on the Labour left from his Novara Media platform, will debate us on Brexit at our summer school, Ideas for Freedom, on 23-24 June. In late May he responded to an article in the Observer by political editor Toby Helm, reporting pressure from Labour members for a real debate on Brexit at Labour conference 2018, by accusing Helm (a routine journalist who used to work for the Daily Telegraph ) of publishing an “AWL press release”. We challenged Bastani to debate Brexit. He agreed to debate Brexit with us two years ago, in a fringe meeting...

Failures of left rule boosted far right

In 1981, a radical left government took power in France. Heading up a coalition of the Socialist and Communist Parties, the new President, Francois Mitterrand ,brought the left in from the cold and promised to “Change Life, Here and Now”. While the workers cheered, many capitalists quailed: the Franc crashed at the news. The election seemed to herald social changes in France and beyond, and for some, the first steps towards establishing socialism in the West. But by the 1990s, almost everything built in the first years of the Mitterrand government had disappeared. The right governed (and from...

For a Workers' Europe

Why campaign to stop Brexit? To uphold the rights of the three million EU migrants currently in Britain, our workmates, our neighbours, our friends, our fellow trade-unionists. To defend their right to reunite their families. To sustain the right of others across Europe to come to work and live in Britain, and the right of British-born people to go to work and live in Europe. We want more open borders, less fences and barbed-wire and barriers between countries. The technologies and productive capacities of today indict the division of continents into walled-off nation-states. But Britain can’t...

LETTER: No real unity without national rights

Any internationalist will undoubtedly share Andrew Northall’s desire ( Solidarity 468 , 2 May 2018) for federation and unity between the Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, the two national peoples currently inhabiting historic Palestine. But the only immediate answer to the day-to-day source of national oppression in the region, Israel’s colonial subjugation of the Palestinians, is an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. As a long-range aspiration, a secular, democratic, binational federation of Palestine, within a secular, democratic, multinational federation of the Middle East...

LETTER: EEA poor substitute

I was intrigued by the line in the editorial in Solidarity 472 , headlined “Build the left against Brexit”. It states Solidarity supports the PLP voting for amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill that would keep the UK in the EEA. Whilst this is an improvement on the prospect of a hard Brexit, I think it is the wrong approach to the question. The AWL has been raising the slogan of “Stop Brexit” and rightly so. Membership of the EEA is a poor substitute for full membership of the EU. EEA members must make budget contributions and accept regulations without having any say in decision making...

Why Greer is wrong about sex and rape

Germaine Greer has once again made the headlines. This time it was for calling for the punishment for rape to be reduced. Speaking at the Hay Literary Festival she argued that rape trials rarely end in convictions, so the courts should simply believe the victim and lower the penalty to alternatives like community service or for rapists to have an “r” tattooed on their body. There is a general consensus amongst large parts of society that the state’s handling of rape cases — the big majority brought by women — is extremely flawed. However, Greer’s proposal shows a serious misunderstanding of...

Rome votes to name street for a fascist

There could be no clearer indication of what the coming to power of Salvini/Di Maio has unleashed in Italy than recent events in Rome’s city council. A motion from the ultra-right “Brothers of Italy” party, passed by a slim majority, committed the council to dedicate one of the city’s thoroughfares to Giorgio Almirante, the principal private secretary of Mussolini’s Minister of Popular Culture, and editor of an extreme voice of racist hatred, the Defence of Race. The vote was supported by members of the Five-Star movement and thus underlines the deepening wave of ideological and political...

New and bigger far right on the streets

The rapid rise of new far-right street movements in the UK, spearheaded by the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA), and coalescing around the #FreeTommy movement, is a serious concern for the left and labour movement. Alongside smaller more hard-line groups such as For Britain and the UK branch of the European far right youth movement, Generation Identity, the nationalist and populist far right are having a resurgence. The DFLA was formed in the wake of the Manchester and London Bridge terror attacks and has brought together elements of the far-right with established football firms and...

Upskirting and the law

On 15 June Conservative MP Sir Christopher Chope got up in the House of Commons to object to a private member’s bill seeing to legislate against “upskirting”. This is the practice of taking photos up peoples’ skirts. The Voyeurism (Offences) Bill, the result of an online petition set up by Gina Martin, herself a victim of upskirting, seeks to amend the Sexual Offences Act 2003 to criminalise the practice where the purpose is to obtain sexual gratification or cause humiliation, distress or alarm. The absence of a specific criminal offence of upskirting in England and Wales has been described as...

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