Issue: 1980
Dated: 10 Dec 2005
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New Labour ministers have queued up to welcome the pensions report produced by former top boss Lord Adair Turner.
Some 10,000 mainly young people marched through central London last Saturday against the inaction of the US and British governments over climate change.
Sefton council’s desperate smear tactics against Defend Council Housing (DCH) campaigners have reached new lows, with the Merseyside council sending out letters to four leading DCH activists threatening legal action against them.
The number of new homes built for rent from housing associations and councils is at its lowest level since 1925.
The left challenge to New Labour received a boost in Newham, east London, last week when a Labour councillor and the secretary of the Liberal Democrats in the area joined Respect.
New Labour is worried that Respect could take control of Tower Hamlets and Newham councils.
Tens of thousands of workers were expected to take to the streets around Ireland this week in solidarity with Irish Ferries workers. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) has called a national day of protest for Friday this week.
Around 400 people marched through Southall, west London, last Sunday calling for justice for the sacked Gate Gourmet workers. Around a quarter of those at the protest were themselves sacked workers.
There were no city buses in Aberdeen last weekend as T&G union members struck for 48 hours and joined mass picket lines from 4am on Saturday morning.
Workers employed by Metronet on the infrastructure of London Underground have voted by 78 percent for strikes against outsourcing.
The campaign to defend Eileen Short, who is being victimised by Tower Hamlets council for her trade union activity and campaigns in defence of council housing, has stepped up a gear with fellow workers in her section planning two days of strike action.
Royal Mail's chairman Allan Leighton told a managers’ meeting last week of his intention to ballot the workforce over his plans to issue shares in the business.
Zimbabwean asylum seekers Thando Dube and Amanda Sibiya were on their 35th day of hunger strike at the Yarl’s Wood detention centre at the beginning of this week.
Over 250 people attended the Latin America 2005 conference in London last Saturday, with at least another 100 turned away because of lack of space.
Natfhe and AUT to merge Members of Natfhe and the AUT have have voted overwhelmingly to merge the two lecturers’ unions into one with 116,000 members.
A demonstration outside the Manchester Evening News brought traffic to a standstill last week as protesters fought to stop the closure of City Life magazine.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) is planning to ballot its members at the BBC over the victimisation of union rep Anna Teeman.
Some 115 people came to a meeting organised around the new book Tell It Like It Is: How Schools Fail Black Children, in north London last week.
Bury Labour council’s plans to close or merge up to eight high schools met with anger and the mood to resist on the streets of Bury, in Greater Manchester, last Saturday.
Striking caretakers from Huddersfield Technical College came to London last week to speak at a Unison union meeting in Croydon and a meeting of the Unison United Left group.
Over 100 members of Left Unity, the broad left within the PCS civil service workers’ union, met in Manchester last Saturday for its annual conference.
The campaign against the dress code at Imperial College in London is starting to make headway. On Thursday of last week some 60 students held a demonstration outside our faculty building — the fortress that houses the college management responsible for the code.
On Thursday of last week, about 100 staff from West Midlands ambulance service attended a joint trade union meeting to discuss possible industrial action.
A vigorous campaign by Unite Against Fascism was instrumental in preventing the fascist British National Party (BNP) from capturing council seats in Thurrock, Essex, on Thursday of last week.
The Amicus union has called off a series of strikes set to begin at Birmingham International Airport on Thursday of this week. These were called as part of a campaign of industrial action after two workers were sacked.
There will be a full house at the International Peace Conference taking place in London this Saturday. Tickets sold out with four days to go.
The contemporary French political scene is intensely contradictory, which is one of the reasons it so difficult to comprehend. Insisting on one or other aspect in isolation from the wider context inevitably leads activists and observers to slalom from euphoria to despair in the matter of days or weeks.
The rich were howling this week after Gordon Brown spiked one of their scams to drain off even more tax relief for elite pension plans.
Home secretary Charles Clarke last month agreed to the US’s request to extradite Babar Ahmad on trumped up "terrorism" charges. Babar’s wife Mrs Ahmad writes about the next stage in the campaign to free him.
"Torture flights", carrying US detainees overseas to be tortured, are passing through Glasgow Prestwick Airport, Ayrshire.
The Turner report on pensions has unleashed a key battle in British politics.
While the full details were not completely clear at the beginning of this week there is no doubt that the government has announced a very serious attack on the local government pension scheme.
Millions of pensioners abandoned It's not just tomorrow’s pensioners that Turner savaged. Pensioners groups hit out as the full details became clear.
"It’s my business so why should I do it as a charity? If you asked the Hilton just to run the food and beverage side of a hotel, they would say no and in education we will say no."Sunny Varkey, whose Gems company runs 13 private schools and now wants to run state schools for profit, on why he rejects accepting charity status which limits profits
This weekend's International Peace Conference in London must be a springboard for extending the anti-war movement into the New Year.
One of the activists coming to Britain for the International Peace Conference is Cindy Sheehan, whose son — US soldier Casey Sheehan — was killed in Iraq.
I was one of a delegation of trade unionists that joined up to 100,000 people marching in Dublin on Friday of last week in support of the workers occupying two Irish Ferries ships in Welsh ports.
Hospitals targeted Health workers in Iraq have launched an international campaign demanding an end to harassment by US troops and their allies.
Workers across Auckland, New Zealand, joined the world’s first strike at Starbucks coffee shops last month.
We say that no deal at the WTO is much better than a bad deal. The draft text released for the upcoming ministerial meeting of the WTO, if agreed in Hong Kong, will destroy the livelihoods of peasants, small farmers, landless and indigenous peoples, fisherfolk and workers the world over.
The breakthrough at the general election, with the 54 MPs for the Left Party returned, was a great advance for the left.
On the final day of November the psychology department of Rome’s La Sapienza university is a hive of activity.
British water company Biwater is suing Tanzania, one of the poorest countries in the world, in revenge for being thrown out of country by the government earlier this year.
Thousands of Sunnis and Shias held a joint demonstration in Baghdad on Friday of last week. The protest was called to denounce military raids, widespread arrests and torture of Sunni Muslims at the hands of the ministry of interior police.
Last week the sixth anniversary of the protests in Seattle passed without much notice. The passage of time has, however, if anything underlined the importance of the challenge that demonstrators mounted to the World Trade Organisation summit on 30 November 1999.
The smoke hadn’t cleared from the Bogside when Captain Mike Jackson, second-in-command of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, standing in the lee of the Rossville Street flats, began pondering the notes that the Bloody Sunday families believe were to become the basis for a cover-up of murder.
Surely one of the most nauseating spectacles in an era that has provided us with so many was the "civil rights tour" that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hosted for her partner-in-war-crimes Jack Straw in late October. During it, they had the incredible cheek to invoke the history of the black freedom struggle to rationalise their ongoing slaughter in Iraq.
"Dear comrade, I shall be very glad to speak at the meeting of 1 November 1890, the more glad that my father was a Jew."
Hassan Jumaa Awad of the General Union of Oil Employees in Basra addressed a meeting organised by Manchester trades council and Greater Manchester Coalition to Stop the War on 24 November.
It has become impossible for anyone with half an eye on Iraq over the last six months not to recognise the widespread presence of death squads, especially in Baghdad and the ring of towns surrounding it.
The Socialist Worker Appeal stands at £108,125. That is no mean achievement and thanks to all who have supported it so far.
Past and Present: 1,000 years of Islam in Britain, New Walk Museum, Leicester, until 23 December
WhiskyDirected by Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll
Kerry James MarshallCamden Arts Centre, north Londonuntil 29 January
MachucaDirected by Andres Wood
Whether it’s the attack on pensions and schools in this country, Italian students protesting against education "reforms", or the Irish Ferries seafarers occupying their vessels, there is a common theme to many of the stories in this week’s Socialist Worker.
This is an unjust eviction Riot police evicted 150 people from their homes in St Agnes Place in Kennington, south London, on Tuesday of last week. Squatters had first occupied the street in 1971.
Meetings And Events