Issue: 2077
Dated: 17 Nov 2007
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Gordon Brown turned up the heat on Iran this week by threatening serious consequences if the country did not comply with US demands to ditch its nuclear programme.
Stop the cuts in adult education Around 100 students and teachers from Lambeth and Morley Colleges in south London lobbied Lambeth council on Wednesday of last week.
Members of the UCU lecturers’ union in further education (FE) colleges around the country are still waiting for a promised ballot on industrial action over their current below inflation pay offer.
The UCU union held a special conference on higher education (HE) last week with over 100 delegates attending from universities across Britain. The conference was called in response to the employers’ threats to abandon national bargaining.
Some 1,300 bus workers at Stagecoach in Manchester have voted overwhelmingly to strike in their battle for better pay.
Trade unionists from across London joined a protest in support of the Fremantle care workers in Barnet, north west London, last Saturday.
One of the most crucial strikes in the National Health Service for more than a decade has erupted in defence of sacked union rep and senior nurse Karen Reissmann.
"Since my sacking, trade unionists and campaigners have rallied magnificently to support our strike," Karen Reissmann told Socialist Worker.
"Socialist Worker is a valuable tool for building socialist ideas and for building Respect. Having a paper like Socialist Worker helps us to keep our minds clearly focused on the issues that matter. It’s a fantastic paper for the movement."
The Scottish TUC women’s Conference this week in Glasgow Glasgow heard strong speeches on abortion rights.
The first policy-making conference of Solidarity – Scotland’s Socialist Movement took place in Glasgow last weekend.
The 70th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war painting Guernica provided the centrepiece for a Sheffield Stop the War Coalition event. It was attended by more than 70 people on Friday of last week and was called to mark the cost of war over the remembrance weekend.
A mass meeting of Wrexham workers facing the end of their final salary pension scheme pledged to fight the proposals last week.
Workers in the GMB union at Swansea council began a strike ballot this week over a single status pay deal.
Michael Gavan’s Unison union branch in Newham, east London, is continuing to fight against his victimisation and suspension from work.
The Writers Guild of Great Britain (WGGB), which is affiliated to the TUC, has pledged its support to the 12,000 members of the Writers Guild of America who have been on strike since last week.
Train drivers in the Aslef union working for Silverlink struck for the third time on Friday of last week in defence of their pension rights.
Around 600 people came to a public meeting organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change (CACC) in central London last week. George Monbiot, John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, Phil Thornhill of CACC and an organiser of August’s Climate Camp all spoke at the meeting.
Workers at Cadbury’s four chocolate factory sites have voted in favour of holding a ballot on strike action.
Over 80,000 members of the PCS civil service workers’ union in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are being balloted to strike over the threatened imposition of a below inflation pay offer.
The management of Remploy is proposing to close 28 factories employing 1,600 disabled workers.
It’s often in our pockets that we connect most directly to the politics of food. But the struggle for food extends across a broader canvas, and it’s one that affects workers intimately. The production of food, for instance, is a battlefield of exploitation and resistance.
Around 80 Respect supporters in Tower Hamlets, east London met on Monday of this week to discuss the way forward for the organisation in the wake of George Galloway’s decision to split.
The Tower Hamlets Respect meeting was chaired by Kumar Murshid, a former Labour councillor in Tower Hamlets and former adviser to London mayor Ken Livingsone. Kumar quit Labour to join Respect earlier this year.
Since my election in May I have been getting myself established as a councillor who works for the people.
Day Centre workers in Glasgow have begun their fifth week of an indefinite strike.
Myself and thousands of other postal workers across Britain this week received ballot papers from our CWU union asking us if we are willing to accept a leadership-backed deal to end our long running dispute.
Activists are campaigning for a no vote in branches that have recommended to accept the deal, as well as in those that aim to reject it.
Leading Scottish human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar has been told that he will face a hearing over possible contempt of court charges.
The ministry of Defence was heavily criticised at the inquest into the death of Gordon Gentle, a soldier who was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in June 2004.
Plans for ID cards are in danger of sliding into farce as hold-ups have again delayed the scheme.
Last week’s Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report into the shooting of the Jean Charles de Menezes notes that not one of the 17 witnesses on the Northern Line tube train could recall hearing armed police identify themselves as they rushed into the train carriage where Jean was shot dead.
Over 500 people joined an angry demonstration in London against foreign intervention in Somalia on Saturday of last week.
The Stop the War Coalition is mobilising against the US, France and Britain’s threats against Iran. Its recent conference called for two days of action next week to highlight the growing danger of the extension of the "war on terror" to Iran.
Some 350 delegates and observers gathered to discuss the way forward at Respect’s fourth annual conference, held at the University of Westminster in central London.
George Galloway MP opened the launch rally for his Respect Renewal organisation with personal attacks on John Rees, the national secretary of Respect, and Lindsey German, Respect candidate for London mayor and convenor of the Stop the War Coalition.
Respect conference looks to the future (part 2)
Mark Serwotka – 'We need a united left alternative to Labour' <object width=\"425\" height=\"355\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/FzxtUoWhgHE&rel=1\"></param><param name=\"wmode\" value=\"transparent\"></param><embed src=\"http://www.youtube.com/v/FzxtUoWhgHE&rel=1\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" wmode=\"transparent\" width=\"425\" height=\"355\"></embed></object>
Students in France are mobilising against a new reform of higher education. Students had struck or occupied at over 30 universities as Socialist Worker went to press.
The spectre of defeat haunts the dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf and his supporters.
Respect came from the anti-war movement and opposition to war and imperialism must remain central priorities.
Preston Respect offers a model of what the organisation could achieve across the country.
‘I was a Labour councillor in Preston for ten years. I left the Labour Party to join Respect because of the work that Respect was doing.
Norman Mailer’s dream was to write the Great American Novel, but, by the time of his death at 84 last weekend, it was clear that he hadn’t succeeded.
The global anti-war movement has achieved unprecedented, astonishing successes. Launched in many cases before a single bomb fell on Afghanistan, it rapidly crystallised into an expression of the grave doubts about US strategy in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, before becoming the organised expression of outright hostility to George Bush’s policies.
Last week’s column argued that mass immigration is intimately connected to the growth of capitalism.
The Communist International was founded in 1919 by those who had stood firm against imperialist war and utilised the crisis of the First World War to "hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule" through revolution.
The credit crisis rumbles on. Just when it seemed safe to sound the all clear, a wave of additional losses has toppled the heads of two major US investment banks. And it has signalled a major intensification of the global credit squeeze that threatens recessions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Clapton in east London is what the home office likes to call a "crime hotspot", brimming with what police jargon calls "targeted individuals" or "prominent nominals". An ethnically mixed area of the capital, it picked up a bad reputation with the media, who called the neighbourhood the "murder mile". Both police and locals say this description is now out of date.
She once described profits as "unpaid wages" and Tavistock as "a town devoted to the production of potpourri".
This album celebrates the life of the great Latin American revolutionary and his "struggle for life".
This is a lovely, eccentric and very musical film set in Dublin. Writer and director John Carney says he set out to make a "visual album" – and the songs play as important a role in the film as the dialogue.
Few Socialist Worker readers will have an Irish language DVD in their film collection. Well here’s a chance to get two, subtitled in English!
The Company is a spy story set in the 1950s, starring the CIA, their friends and their enemies. Half the characters are double crossing the other half, mostly in shadows, darkened rooms and gloomy alleyways.
As brave lawyers and democracy activists battle it out with General Musharraf’s police, the British and US establishments have been busy behind the scenes.
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