Solidarity 424, 30 November 2016

The world’s leading financial media has recently sharply turned their attention to the critical consequences of Italy’s constitutional referendum on 4 December. What stirs these experts is the significance of the vote for the country’s notoriously precarious banking system and the effect of a rejection — the no vote is 5-7 points ahead in the polls — for political stability in Europe. Prime Minister Renzi wants to transform the elective Italian Senate into an apparatus of the ruling party or the government, composed of 100 senators, selectively picked from Mayors and councillors from the...

It is conceivable that within a year or so there will be no European Union, or not much of an EU, for Britain to quit. In Italy, Salvini’s right-wing nationalist and anti-immigrant Lega Nord may be able to seize the initiative after the likely defeat on 4 December of prime minister Matteo Renzi in Renzi’s referendum on increased executive powers. Or it may be the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo, who has tacked left sometimes but who greeted Trump’s election with right-wing bombast. Trump, Grillo said, had defeated the “journalists and intellectuals of the system, serving the big powers...

The Brexit vote was “a bitter blow for the establishment, big business, the international financial institutions, the rich and the politicians” says Charlie Kimber, writing for International Socialism Journal. This gives the impression, ″with minor exceptions″, that the ruling class was united in their support for remaining in the EU, which is clearly a fantasy. Cut through the pseudo sociology in Kimber’s analysis and you are left with two points. The leave vote was primarily a revolt against the establishment and was not dominated by racism or hostility to migrants. What evidence does Kimber...

18 UK police forces are being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission over 187 complaints related to child sexual exploitation cases. The IPCC says some of the complaints involve what it considers to be ″high-level corruption″. More than a quarter of the complaints relate to South Yorkshire Police over its failing of young people in Rotherham between 1997 and 2014. The 2014 Jay Report into child sexual exploitation (CSE) in Rotherham found police had repeatedly disbelieved young people and in many cases arrested young girls found with much older men for being “drunk and...

More than 20 ex-football players have come forward with reports they were sexually abused as children by coaches. The revelations have sparked an investigation by five police forces, as well as an internal investigation by the Football Association. An NSPCC hotline has already received over 100 calls. The scandal unfolded after former Sheffield United player Andy Woodward waived his anonymity and told the Guardian that he had been abused by coach Barry Bennell while a youth player at Crewe Alexandra. Woodward’s testimony prompted other former players to come forward with allegations against...

Research on Ofsted points to endemic problems in the schools system and inspection regime. Last week, the Education Policy Institute (EPI) released important findings about the fairness of Ofsted reports in England. They found a “systematic negative correlation” between schools with children from poorer backgrounds or lower prior attainment and positive Ofsted judgments. In other words, schools with children from better off backgrounds are more likely to get Good or Outstanding judgments and schools with children who have previously achieved well are also more likely to get Good or Outstanding...

The conviction of Stephen Port for the murder of four young men has raised a number of questions over the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into the deaths. The police failed to link the deaths of the men, two of whom were found in the same place in a Barking Graveyard a few weeks apart. The police also failed to properly investigate the earlier case of student Anthony Walgate, who was found dead outside Port’s flat. Port was questioned by police, but his explanation that Walgate had taken drugs and died and that, in a panic, Port had put him outside of his flat, was accepted. Police only...

Fidel Castro, one of the last remaining leaders of a Stalinist state, died last week at the age of 90. Among sections of the left there is near-hysterical outpouring of eulogy, while bourgeois commentators blithely dismiss him as a communist despot. A third camp socialist assessment of Castro’s politics is needed. Fidel Castro was undoubtedly the central historical figure of modern Cuban history. The 1959 revolution that brought his 26 July Movement (M26J) to power was a bourgeois political revolution which smashed Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, but replaced it with their own Bonapartist...

Ministers in Israel's hard-right government have voted unanimously for a bill that seeks to retroactively legitimise settlement outposts built illegally on Palestinian land in the West Bank. It then passed its first reading in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, by 58 votes to 50. A 25 December deadline for the evacuation of the Amona settlement outpost, northeast of Ramallah, still stands, after courts rejected a government bid to delay it, but if the new bill becomes law, between 2,000 and 3,000 settler homes built illegally on private Palestinian land, including Amona, could be legitimised...

Some comrades will remember Miłka Tyszkiewicz speaking at meetings in the UK in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The appeal below on her behalf is from Marek Krukowski and Jόzef Pinior. Marek is a Director of the Warsaw based Foundation for Freedom and Peace. The legendary socialist Solidarity underground leader, Jόzef Pinior, later served terms as a Member of the European Parliament and the Polish Senate, elected on different party lists, but retaining his independent left status. A few quid will help Miłka live a little better until her operation and hopefully her recovery afterwards. Iwona Bogumiła...