Solidarity 403, 4 May 2016

Parents protest at imposed testing

On Tuesday 3 May, thousands of parents, organised by the Let Kids be Kids campaign, kept their seven year old children from school to protest at the government-imposed SATS tests. Preparation for those tests, they say, squeezes out creative learning and makes children anxious. “What if I fail?” A box-ticking, hurdle-jumping structure to education is common to capitalist education systems. England’s obsession with testing, and testing, and testing again is extreme. It indoctrinates young children into thinking “I’m a level 3” or “my brother is a level 4”. Even conservatives are being forced to...

More concessions on Trade Union Bill

After the news on 19 April that the government was dropping the changes to ″check off″ in the Trade Union Bill, it has now also rowed back slightly on changes to trade union funding of political parties. The bill requires unions to move from a system of members ″opting out″ of their union′s political fund to one where members have to ″opt in″. Labour Party funding will take a huge hit. The government is delaying the implementation of the change for 12 months, allowing unions time to ″adjust″. Hardly a huge win, but trade union leaders and officials have been spending a lot of energy ″lobbying″...

Keep faith in our solidarity

Turnout in the latest round of strike action by junior doctors (26-27 April) was an estimated 78%. Considering that around 80% of junior doctors are BMA members and that doctors on maternity leave, sick leave and those working nights won’t be included, this is an incredible turnout. Junior doctors are growing in confidence, our placards are improving and we are getting better at picketing effectively. Public support remains strong and more blame the government for this dispute than they did in January. We have had the full support of senior clinicians and the rest of the health service, and...

No to forced academies!

Teachers, parents, governors, trade union, Labour and community activists turned out to the first Hands off Our Schools – No to Forced Academies meeting in Leeds on Thursday 28 April. 100 people attended. Organised by the Leeds National Union of Teachers (NUT) branch, it was a positive first step in building a campaign to defeat the Government’s White Paper on Education. This is the government’s attempt to force through wholesale privatisation of education. Patrick Murphy, Leeds NUT, spoke about some key elements to fight against — lack of democracy, the lack of evidence for any benefit to...

End the “offshore policy”!

On 26 April, Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court ruled that Australia’s detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island is illegal because it breaches the right to personal liberty in the PNG constitution. Manus is a sparsely populated island off the coast of PNG, over 1000km from the nearest tip of Australia. It has been used by Australian governments as a detention centre for asylum seekers since 2012, and previously in 2001-2004. There are 850 asylum seekers there now. The PNG Supreme Court has ordered the PNG and Australian Governments to end their detention of asylum seekers in PNG. But...

Islamist terror hits Bangladesh

On 25 April Xulhaz Mannan, the editor of Roopbaan, the country’s first magazine for lesbian gay and transgender people, was hacked to death in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital. Homosexuality is illegal in Bangladesh. This is the sixteenth murder in a series of Islamist machete killings over the past three years. Other targets have included secular bloggers and liberal intellectuals. Responsibility for all the attacks has been claimed by Islamic State or Ansar al-Islam, a local chapter of al-Qaida. Sheikh Hasina, leader of the Awami League and Prime Minister since 2009, has said she will not be held...

The left and anti-semitism

Recent controversies in the Labour Party have brought the issue of antisemitism on the left to wider attention. "Left-wing" antisemitism is not a new phenomenon: from pre-First World War conspiracy theories about Jewish financiers (a critique which German revolutionary August Bebel labelled "the socialism of fools”) to anti-Jewish campaigns in Stalin’s USSR, there is a long history of antisemitism expressing itself on the left. Is the problem one of a few bad apples, or something deeper? What are the links, if any, between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? How can antisemitism on the left and in...

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