Two hundred day care workers in centres across Glasgow are now entering
the second month of an indefinite strike, after the Council refused to
negotiate pay and conditions until the workers agreed to ‘modernisation
of services’. The day care centres provide support and education for
people with disabilities and learning difficulties and are crucial not
only for the clients who use them, but for their families.
On June 15th psychiatric nurse Karen Reissmann was ordered off the
premises and suspended in the middle of a delicate and difficult
consultation with a patient. Manchester Mental Health and Social Care
Trust charged her with ‘bringing the Trust into disrepute’. Don’t let them sack Karen Reissmann – an injury to one is an injury to all!
The
proposals for constitutional change have been defeated by 50.7% to 49.3%. The
opposition hardly increased its absolute vote, but there was a high level of
abstention. This is a warning. The masses are demanding decisive action not
words! It may be that this defeat will have the opposite effect. It can rouse
the masses to new levels of revolutionary struggle.
Last August Northern Rock was the subject of the first run on a bank in
this country for a hundred and forty years. People queued up all night
to try to get their money back. But, of course, their money wasn’t
there. Where had it gone?
This week, a CIA memo has been discovered that confirms the existence of a coup plan, which is code-named Operation Pliers.
On Sunday, we will be rallying against the CIA coup attempt outside
Bolivar Hall, where the Venezuelan community in London will be voting,
from 5pm once the poll has closed.
Production at the
American dream factory has slowed down as workers organised in the Writers
Guild of America just completed their third week on strike. 4,000 marched in
support of the strike down the famous Hollywood Boulevard.
We are publishing
here an interesting piece on the Irish trade unions by Peter Black, an active
member of the TGWU (now fused with Amicus to form "Unite") and the Irish
Republican Socialist Party. Trade union membership is growing in Ireland, as is
the militancy of the working class and Socialist Republicans, in the tradition
of James Connolly, can play an important role in providing the militant
leadership the Irish workers deserve.
Everywhere the cry is: credit crunch! You can smell the sweat on the brows of
bankers as their necks are squeezed by the tightening credit noose. In all the offices of the great investment
banks of Wall Street, the City of London and gnomes of Zurich, you can hear the
hissing sound of the global financial bubble bursting and deflating.
On Saturday 24th November over 2,000
trade unionists marched through Manchester demanding the reinstatement of
UNISON health service activist Karen Reissmann. Banners were present
from UNISON branches across the country, but also from UNITE branches, civil service
branches, teachers, lecturers, journalists, railway workers, fire-fighters,
postal workers and specialist hospital workers, like Midwives.
On Saturday November 24th,
around two hundred people attended the third national Hands Off Venezuela
conference in Britain.
The whole day was a great
success and left everyone inspired to carry on the struggle to defend the
Venezuelan people and their Bolivarian revolution.
Most current debate on multiculturalism revolves
around fundamental conflicts within liberalism. The liberal hegemony has meant
that the intense and detailed debates that accompanied the evolution of Marxist
social democracy have been relegated to the historical margins. The Marxist debate starts from a very
different perspective. Its focus is not the individual, but society as a whole.
This article is a re-examination of these debates and of
their historical interpretations in order to throw a new light on issues today.