Solidarity 354, 18 February 2015

Stop whose war?

The Stop the War Coalition (SWC) and the Solidarity with the Antifascist Resistance in Ukraine (SARU) campaign are staging a protest about Ukraine in London on Sunday 22 February. In the course of 2014 Russia annexed Crimea, encouraged and organised separatist agitation in the south-east of Ukraine, invaded Ukraine in late August, and consistently provided the separatists with some of the most modern munitions and weaponry available. SWC and SARU have therefore decided to picket – the US Embassy! According to publicity for the event, the USA and NATO are “beating the drums of war”. They intend...

A look at RS21 and ISN

Two organisations emerged as splits from the Socialist Workers’ Party during its crisis over the Martin Smith sexual assault dispute: the International Socialist Network and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (RS21). Neither organisation seems to have engaged, as an organisation, in serious discussion about the theory and politics of the SWP, or the political basis for building something better. Both have attracted, relative to their size, a fairly significant number of new members who were not in the SWP. Whereas RS21 seems to have integrated them through more consistent activity...

Ditch the pink van and get some policies!

Is it magenta? Is it cerise? Is it a “one nation colour”? Does anyone care? Regardless of how you spin it, the person or people who thought up using a Barbie-pink transit van to try to persuade women to vote Labour is probably kicking themselves — or being kicked by a senior Public Relations person. The right-wing press has been having a field day about the “patronising” pink minibus, its “Woman to Woman” slogan and its proponents, Harriet Harman, Gloria de Piero and Lucy Powell. (Deputy Leader, Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities and Vice Chair of the General Election Campaign...

300 migrants drown in Mediterranean

Over 300 migrants, thought to be from sub-Saharan Africa, drowned earlier this month, in an effort to reach Europe. It is thought that three inflatable boats each carrying around 100 people, on waters with temperatures barely above zero with waves as high as eight metres, capsized between North Africa and Sicily. The news came shortly after 29 migrants froze to death trying to make the same journey. There have been many similar stories over the past months. Last year, 3,419 migrants lost their lives in this way. At the end of last year, the Italian government gave in to anti-immigrant pressure...

Ukraine peace deal fails

As we go to press on 17 February, fighting continues in the south-east of Ukraine despite the “peace deal” agreed in Minsk on 12 February. The “peace deal” had been negotiated by the German, French, Russian and Ukrainian heads of state. Representatives of the so-called Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” (DPR and LPR) had also been present in Minsk, but not directly involved in the negotiations. A ceasefire was due to come into effect at midnight on Saturday 14th. On day two of the ceasefire both sides were to begin the withdrawal of heavy weapons, creating a 50 kilometres buffer zone...

Liam Byrne “would love free education”

In an apparent bid to stop any more students pledging to vote for the Green Party, Labour’s shadow minister for higher education, Liam Byrne, is touring the ten campuses where students have the ability to swing the vote. I interrogated Byrne at the Kings College London leg of his tour, about tuition fees, living grants and how rubbish his proposal of a graduate tax is. We filmed him contradicting his usual line; he told us that he was in favour of free education in principle, but he wasn’t going to make promises he couldn’t keep. Whilst we should not trust anything this man says, the fact that...

The £120 billion gap

If you fail to declare something relevant to a benefits claim, you will be pauperised by being cut off benefits. You may be fined or jailed. 250 people were jailed for benefit fraud in the last year for which we have detailed figures, 2012. Hundreds of thousands have to appeal to food banks after having benefits cut off, often because of no misdeed at all. The government estimates benefit fraud at £2 billion a year — and benefits unclaimed by people who find the system to hard to negotiate at £12 billion a year. The government’s official tax collectors, HMRC, say: “The tax gap for 2011-12 is...

How Egypt's workers were defeated

On 25 January 2011, an 18 day struggle began that toppled one of the Arab world’s longest-serving dictators, Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt. Eighteen months later, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, the founding party of political Islam, was elected president. After barely a year he was deposed by a military coup and the old order was restored under Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. In the space of four years, Egypt has traversed from Mubarak’s military Bonapartism through the so-called “Republic of Tahrir” to the current “Republic of Fear”. The revival of workers’ struggle in Egypt a decade ago...

Free speech on campus and beyond

We are living in a time when freedom of expression is being curtailed on many different fronts. On February 14 in Copenhagen, a meeting debating blasphemy and the right to offend was cut short by a gunman apparently determined to execute Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist known for his cartoons of Muhammad. The gunman managed to kill a 55 year old audience member and followed this by killing a Jewish security guard outside a synagogue the following day. Is this going to be the inevitable consequence of doing things considered blasphemous by some fanatics? Will the political and cultural...

A response to John McInally and the Socialist Party

In a bizarre article published on the Socialist Party website, the vice-president of the civil service union PCS, and leading SP member, John McInally, has attacked the record of Workers’ Liberty within the PCS and the wider labour movement. The topic of the article is the latest Tory assault on civil servants. The two largest government departments (Department of Work and Pensions and Revenue and Customs) have been instructed to withdraw “check off”. This is the mechanism by which union subscriptions are deducted from salary and given to PCS union. PCS pays a nominal fee for this service. The...

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