Uncategorised articles from The Communist archives.
Tony Blair suffered his first ever defeat in parliament yesterday when 49 Labour MPs voted against the introduction of new repressive ‘anti-terror’ legislation. The defence of civil liberties, consistently under attack from the Blair government, is a vitally important question in its own right. However, as Phil Mitchinson explains, Blair’s parliamentary defeat has far wider implications for the future of the British labour movement.
The idea that Brown
has been secretly opposed to privatisation, to the war in Iraq, to the Labour
government’s assault on civil liberties ‑ but keeping quiet through ‘loyalty’
(to his career that is, not to the Labour Party or working class Labour voters)
‑ is patently absurd. Both should go.
“I was a member of the British Labour party
for some years and seeing that old man being manhandled the way he was out of
the Labour conference made my blood boil and almost brought me to tears.”
The 2005 Labour Party
Conference marks a significant shift in the situation in Britain. It deserves careful study by Marxists and by every
trade union and Labour activist. It was chiefly marked by a sharp conflict
between the Party leadership and the trade unions
Anyone
who doubted the wider implication for civil liberties of Blair’s ‘anti-terror’
legislation need look no further than the Labour Party Conference in Brighton.
82-year-old Walter Wolfgang, who fled Nazi Germany in 1937, was roughly
manhandled out of the hall by a pair of heavies
The
recent announcement that the Provisional IRA had decommissioned all its weapons
has been drowned out by the blasts of the loyalist paramilitaries using theirs.
The Good Friday Agreement is dead. Instead of peace we have a dramatic increase
in extreme sectarian violence. More than ever the call for working class unity
in the struggle for socialism is the only answer.
Three Amicus members
of staff have been suspended
from their jobs in the union. All three are leading members of the
broad left that was instrumental in defeating the right wing and
getting Derek Simpson elected as General Secretary. No reason has been
given
for their suspension. It is obviously a politically motivated attack.
Please
take part in the campaign to get the three reinstated.
No
one union alone can successfully fight the present anti-union laws. But imagine
if the TUC were to lead a major protest against the laws in every workplace and
organised on behalf of 7 million union members a direct challenge to those laws
– that would have more effect than any number of seminars and workshops and
would put unions in a stronger position to win.
A leading member of Venezuela’s largest union, the National Workers
Union, UNT, will be present at the TUC, having been invited by the
National Union of Journalists and by Hands Off Venezuela. NATFHE will
move a resolution in support of Venezuela and the progressive policies
of the government of president Hugo Chávez, committing the TUC to work
with solidarity campaigns and to build links with Venezuelan trade
unionists.