Solidarity 362, 29 April 2015

Vote Labour! Demand taxes on the rich!

Since 2009 the richest 1,000 households in Britain have more than doubled their wealth. The top thousand’s assets total £547 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2015. In 2009 the total was £258 billion. The 2015 figure is a 32% rise compared even to the figure at the giddy peak of the boom before the autumn 2008 crash. Meanwhile the average household’s real income is still below what it was in 2009-10. Low-paid workers, disabled people (whether working or not), young workers, and public service workers have suffered especially. Some categories are over 20% worse off than in 2009....

Defending the nation from “Red Ed”

It was St George’s Day last week, so I decided to have a look at the Daily Express, the paper which still uses a crusader-esque knight errant as its logo, complete with English flag shield. It was immediately apparent that they’re doing a good job defending the nation, since the paper has identified an insidious threat: “Trident nuclear submarines to be moved to Gibraltar under SNP threat” their headline howled. “Threat” is the sort of language the Express has used to describe the KGB/IRA/Taliban/Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone, so it’s great to see the SNP taking part in the...

Stop some wars?

The Syria Solidarity Movement UK reports that at a Migrant Lives Matter protest in London on 25 April, the Stop the War Coalition stopped the Syrian movement representative speaking. The Syrian group calls for “a peaceful, democratic Syria, a Syria without Assad and a Syria without ISIS”. Their speech would have demanded the British government take in more refugees from Syria. “Stop the War” started by denouncing the NATO bombing which forced Serbia out of Kosova in 1999, but saying nothing about Serbia's slaughter and driving-out of Kosovars. It flourished in justified protest against the US...

The continuing attack on Charlie Hebdo

On Sunday 26 April I saw a Facebook posting which carried the pithy comment “anyone still Charlie”? The posting shared a story from “OurAfricaBlog” about an allegedly outrageous cartoon which, the blog claimed, appeared in the French satirical magazine whose leading staff members were brutally murdered by religious fascists earlier this year. The cartoon dealt with the horrific drowning of migrants in the Mediterranean the previous week. It featured roughly-drawn black figures falling to the bottom of the ocean under the headline “Regroupement Familial En Mediterranee”. The blog translated...

Restore secular politics in Tower Hamlets

I don't like the idea that a privileged, conservative judge ousts Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman for alleged electoral malpractice, rather than a tribunal of the people he is supposed to serve. I also don't know whether all the accusations against Rahman upheld by the judge are true or not. I am not going to take the judge's word for it. I am also not going to take the word of former councillors for George Galloway's Respect group that he is not. The residents of Tower Hamlets, of which I am one, have plenty of reasons to want Rahman and his communalist politics out. Some left-wingers are...

How I got my job back

Charlotte Monro, a union activist, was sacked more than 18 months ago by Bart's Trust after working at Whipps Cross Hospital for more than 25 years. She spoke to Jill Mountford about her battle for reinstatement. I spoke at a local council overview and scrutiny committee about planned cuts to our stroke service in the hospital. That seems to have triggered the action against me. It started within six days. A key allegation was that I brought the trust into disrepute by providing inaccurate information to OSC, though they could not tell me what it was that was inaccurate. In reality it was that...

NUS conference 2015: has the left won control?

(Hattie Craig and Beth Redmond speak at an NCAFC fringe meeting at NUS conference) Many on the student left, including us, have written about leftish shifts in the National Union of Students before. What happened at this year’s NUS conference (in Liverpool, 21-23 April), though still limited and contradictory, was of a different order. It comes about five years after the student movement revived from a long lull, four and a bit years years after the great student upsurge of winter 2010-11, and immediately after a wave of important struggles. Victories for the left The broadly right-wing Labour...

Scotland: Vote Labour, not Nationalist!

“Neither Nicola Sturgeon nor her deputy (Stewart Hosie) are saying austerity can be avoided. Instead, it’s being re-badged and re-profiled, or spread out for longer. …” “The defiant refusal to accept more austerity, which won power for Syriza in Greece last month, is not being offered here. Instead, a serious bid for a share of power in Britain requires a message that won’t spook the markets.” That was the verdict of BBC Scotland’s business and economy editor Douglas Fraser after listening to SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon speak on SNP economic policy at a meeting of academics in London in...

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