Ireland: Thousands of Nurses, teachers, civil servants, local
government workers and other hard pressed public sector workers will no doubt
shed a tear today after hearing how disappointed Mr Cowen is that they are
going to be on strike. For sure the Taoiseach wasn’t just disappointed
according to RTÉ he was indeed “deeply disappointed.”
Ireland might be out of the World Cup, but
the Irish working class is at the forefront of the struggle against the
bosses crisis. It’ll take much more than a dodgy hand ball to take the
heat out of this situation. Earlier today yet another major union voted
massively to join the public sector strikes on November 24th. SIPTU’s 70,000 members voted by 85% in favour of participating in what is becoming more or less a de facto Public Sector General Strike.
We reproduce here a translation of an interview with Alan Woods published in a daily newspaper in Venezuela during his current visit to the country
The working masses and poor of South Africa overthrew the old hated
Apartheid regime as a means of improving their living and working
conditions. Instead what we have is a party in power, the ANC, which
was created by the working masses but which is presently carrying out
policies in the interests of the rich. This contradiction must be
resolved and the only way is for the working people to take back
control of the party they created.
Honduras: In a previous article we pointed to
the fact that the Tegucigalpa/San José Accord signed on October 30 was
a farce. Events have now confirmed that we were right. To accept the
agreement now would be a betrayal of the mass movement. What is
required now is an active boycott, combined with mass mobilisation for
the overthrow of the present illegitimate regime
Ireland: 65,000
teachers in the primary and secondary education, further education and
third level institutions have voted to back the strike action on 24th
November. The action covering both academic and non academic staff
means that effectively the entire education sector will be shut down
for the day. The four unions involved INTO, TUI, ASTI and IFUT which organises two thirds of university teachers have all returned huge votes in favour of strike action.
Saturday November 14th saw the Scottish Defence
League’s attempt at a Glasgow
city centre rally fail miserably. The group spent most of the day confined in a
pub, protected by hundreds of police, before being forced onto chartered buses
in the face of a much larger counter demonstration. However, the story is not
simply one of the far right being driven from the streets by a left wing
demonstration. There are many political lessons to be learned from Saturday’s
events and the lead up to it which are important for those attempting to
effectively oppose the English Defence League and its Scottish ally
This year’s LRC conference took place on Saturday 14th
November in central London.
The LRC is currently the biggest left formation in the Labour Party with over
1000 members and with affiliations from 6 national trade unions. Although it is
probably the most significant left group in the party for some 15 or more
years, it is best viewed as an
anticipation of what is to come. Some 240 people attended this year’s
conference with about half being delegates from affiliated organisations. The
composition of the conference was in the main drawn from older lefts in the
unions and the Labour Party, but there was also a smattering of young people.
The Glasgow North East By-election was billed by political
commentators as a final test for Gordon Brown and his leadership of the Labour
Party. If he was to loose another Labour heartland seat in Glasgow to the Scottish National Party (SNP)
then he would struggle to hold on to his position as party leader. Despite many
early predictions to the contrary, Labour held on to the seat (formerly held by
the speaker and therefore previously benefiting from no opposition from Tories
or Lib-Dems) and actually managed to increase their percentage of the vote. But
this hides the real story. Labour got 3,000 less votes than they did in 2005, these
votes did not fall to the Nationalist, who lost 1,000 votes on last time but
instead fell into mass abstentions making this the lowest turn-out in a
Scottish by-election ever.
New
Labour, the government that introduced tuition fees and student loans in 1998 and
then narrowly passed a bill to introduce top-up fees of £3,200 per year from
2006, have recently launched a “higher education finance review” to look into
raising the cap on tuition fees (possibly up to £7000 per year) and examine the
way in which universities should be funded. The appointment of Lord Browne, a
friend of Peter Mandelson and former chief of the multinational oil-giant BP,
to chair the fees review has not done anything to encourage university
students, who already face the prospect of an accumulated debt of over £23,000
upon graduation.
Students at the London College of
Communication occupied the main lecture hall as part of a campaign to
oppose planned cutbacks.The action started on Monday night and
continued untill Wednesday afternoon. The decision to occupy was taken after a meeting on 9th
of November where management refused to compromise on a “restructuring” plan
that will involve course closers and staff redundancies, which have already amounted to over 150.
In the aftermath of the decision by the CWU leadership to call off the latest round of national action last week, there are allready signs that the deal agreed may be unravelling. We reproduce here a statement issued by Socialist Appeal supporters in the CWU on the way forward.