Solidarity 434, 29 March 2017

It is probably not possible to know and therefore pointless to speculate why Khalid Masood carried out the attack on Westminster Bridge and the Palace of Westminster on 22 March. Better to focus our thoughts on sympathy with the victims of the attack and building the better society that can works against such behaviour. Daesh were quick to claim that Masood was a soldier of the Caliphate, who had responded to their call. Masood was a “soldier” in the same sense that the attackers in Nice and Berlin were soldiers who attacked civilians using vehicles. In Masood’s case he also used a knife...

Philip Hammond’s Budget on 7 March, while continuing plans for large overall cuts in school funding, allocated money for new “free schools”. Some of those, the Tories, indicate, will be new selective secondary schools, “grammar schools”. On 19 March, Lucy Powell, Labour shadow education minister until last year’s post-23-June mass resignations designed to push Jeremy Corbyn out, joined with Tory former education minister Nicky Morgan and Lib-Dem Nick Clegg to oppose this move. “All the evidence is clear that grammar schools damage social mobility”, they wrote in the Observer. “In highly...

The recent deaths of more than 150 civilians in airstrikes in Mosul was the result of US military action. The US has accepted responsibility but has not confirmed there were civilian casualties. Amnesty International reports a significant rise in civilian casualties since eastern Mosul was taken by the Iraqi army. Reports suggest residents were told not to leave their homes before airstrikes began. Such a casual attitude to civilian casualties was sadly very likely from the outset of operations in Mosul. Amnesty points to evidence of “an alarming pattern of US-led coalition airstrikes [in...

It is now over a year since the Scottish Parliament passed a piece of legislation. But Scotland is no SNP-ruled utopia which has no need of legislative reform or intervention. Over the past year the number of people in Scotland living in relative poverty has increased by 2%. Child poverty has increased by 4%. The income of the top 10% of the population is now 38% higher than that of the bottom 40%. Two years ago the difference was 15%. Spending on schools has declined by 5% in recent years. For seven years in a row the number of teachers for pupils with Additional Support Needs has fallen...

On 22 March, Brazil’s coup government of Michel Temer brought forward a law, previously shelved, to legalise the expansion of outsourcing. Businesses will now be able to outsource workers for their primary activity (for example, teachers in a school). Government owned institutions can now use sub-contractors, opening the door for private sector interference in nationalised sectors. Outsourced workers in Brazil earn on average 24.7% less than directly-employed workers, work three more hours per week, and have a total employment time of less than half of non-outsourced workers. Expansion of...

The young Martin McGuinness was a typical Catholic boy who grew up in the six north-east counties of Ireland, in the Protestant-sectarian backyard of the British state, the "Protestant sub-state for a Protestant people". The sub-state had a one-in-three Catholic minority. In McGuinness's Derry, two miles from the border with the 26 Counties, it was the other way round: there was a Catholic majority of two-to-one. In the Protestant state for a Protestant people, inconveniences like that could be dealt with by a little judicious gerrymandering of election boundaries. The Protestant one-third...

Introduction by Sean Matgamna Another day The document we reprint here, Liam Daltun's account in a letter to Sean Matgamna of events in the Irish Communist Group, deals with an important episode in the history of the Irish left. The ICG, set up in 1964, was a foredoomed experiment in building an organisation involving both Trotskyists and Chinese-oriented "revolutionary" Stalinists. Stalinist Beijing and Moscow had fallen out. The Chinese criticised Moscow from the "left" - for instance, questioning the dogma of the Stalinist parties controlled by Moscow that there could be a peaceful...

Cleaners at the London School of Economics struck on 15 and 16 March. The 5 a.m. picket lines were brightened by 48 hours of painting, teach-ins, music, and protest. The high point was the occupation of the grandiose offices of the cleaner’s managing company Noonan based at Number One Kingsway. The strike represented the first of its kind in the 126 year history of the school, but its significance extended far beyond its status as an episode of historical labour memory. The simultaneous adornment of banners across both the steps of the Victorian Old Building and the postmodern glass...