From The River To The Sea…

… Palestine sends a tree!

As long-term readers of this blog will know, the University of Manchester Students Union is twinned with An-Najah in the West Bank, and last autumn a rightwing attempt to undermine this historic show of solidarity was thwarted.  A motion was put forward at a general meeting that would have constrained the union of An-Najah to sign a statement “renouncing terror”, to be written by the motion’s sponsors, or have the twinning annulled.  A massive (four figure) turnout rejected the motion, amending it to one that celebrated the twinning and accepted in advance the gift of an olive tree, to symbolise peace and solidarity, from our Palestinian comrades.

Six months later (and sixty years after the naqba that made all this necessary), here it is:

I hope it will survive in these chilly Northern climes and turbulent political climate (my friend who brought it from the airport was recently harrassed by the police for, in the words of their incident report, ”wearing a Palestinian t-shirt”).  Marches like the one today are important, now more than ever, but this little tree will bring me hopw in between times.

Guantanamero

Good news, everyone. After six and a half years in Guantanamo Bay, Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al Hajj has finally been released without charge this weekend. He is now back with his family in Sudan, although his release was conditioned upon his being banned from leaving the country or working as a journalist.

The noises about the notorious prison complex being shut down seem to have gone away for the time being; still, it’s only one of a network of such places across the world and on Diego Garcia, and it’s going to take nothing short of the full scale defeat of American imperialism to get those gone.

Anyway, before it became tied up with the torture resort we’ve come to know and love, Gitmo was best known for the Cuban patriotic song Guantanamera. Although originally the story of a peasant girl from Guantanamo who broke the narrator’s heart, the structure lends itself to adaptation and “the Guantanamera became a popular vehicle for romantic, patriotic, humorous, or social commentary lyrics, in Cuba and elsewhere in the Spanish speaking world”. The classic version comes from a patriotic poem by Jose Martin, and on youtube you’ll find versions by Celia Cruz and even, if you dare, a pisspoor retread by Wyclef Jean.

The most pertinent version, though, is Guantanamero, written by Richard Stallman after he made the link between the prison camp and the song. The download is in .ogg format, which I’d never heard of before, but my mp3 player had no particular problem with it. Lyrics follow, in Spanish and English.

Off to a good start 2 - No pasaran

Now that the dust has settled, we can get the BNP’s recent electoral successes into perspective. As the indispensable anti-fascist blog Lancaster Unity reminds us:

The results are not good - there’s no getting away from that fact - though the BNP’s net increase of ten councillors and the idiotic Richard Barnbrook’s election to the London Assembly are more as a result of the rocky position in which the current government finds itself rather than anything the BNP has done or said. That said, the result is very far short of the BNP’s expectation - they were hoping for forty new councillors and three Assembly members. And there is even more good news, as reported by Searchlight, which pointed out very clearly how the BNP’s vote in many of its heartlands has gone down, in some cases quite considerably. Nevertheless, with the Euro-elections coming up, we need to remain alert and to keep working hard and continually against the ever-present threat of the far-right.

That’s certainly not something I’d dispute. The BNP’s London breakthrough is not symptomatic of a sudden rightwards surge in public opinion.  Left unchallenged, however, Barnbrooke (once he sobers up after his slurred-but-scary victory speech) and co are sure to drag fascist ideas even more into the mainstream.  Already the BBC laments the plight of the forgotten whites and the respectable “liberal” media hypes up the Islamic threat, and it’s hard to see the rhetoric getting much worse without a significant escalation in racist violence.

That’s why Love Music Hate Racism has called a demonstration outside City Hall at 6pm on Tuesday; hopefully the momentum generated by the spectacularly successful carnival will carry accross to make this a big success; I’d urge anyone in or near London to get down to it.

The far-right have long enjoyed much less success in Britain than elsewhere in Europe, and this is in large part because anti-fascist movements have enjoyed much more success here.  In 1936 the lefties, Jews
and Irishmen of the East End united to stop Mosley’s fascists from marching down Cable Street, in what many saw as an extension of the Spanish Civil War.  The Blackshirts never recovered.  A broad anti-racist coalition - in which my very own SWP played a leading role - won a similar victory in Lewisham in 1977, galvanising an antifascist movement that smashed the NF for a generation.  In both cases, the police made themselves the vanguard of the fascist marchers.  Now I wouldn’t like to see the state banning fascist marches and organisations, given that they would ultimately end up applying those powers against us more than against anyone else, but it’s interesting to see how far they’ll go.  Compare the beating, arresting and, in at least one case, killing to defend the fascists’ “freedom of speech” with the attempted banning of the antiwar protest in October, the absurd restrictions placed upon anti-corporate campaigners, the arrest of the “lyrical terrorist” and other Muslims with questionable reading material, and tell me you don’t see a pattern of hypocrisy emerging.

But I digress.  It is because of the Anti Nazi league and its successors that the BNP have had to take the electoralist pretence of respectability so seriously.  In the continent, where the Neo-Nazis have not faced such vigorous and consistent challenges, they are in positions of much greater strength.  It’s a lesson they are now applying in Germany; in news every bit as encouraging, in its own way, as the spectacular antiwar dockers’ strike in America on the same day, 7000 antifascists thwarted a 1000-strong fascist march on the streets of Hamburg this Thursday.  Incidentally, while you could argue that the Hamburger partisans went a bit far, you have to remark at the BBC’s spectacularly biased reporting of the incident.

In this spirit, I’ve been listening to theexcellent Battle of Lewisham discussion from last year’s Marxism festival over at Resistance MP3s.  Whether such street fighting will become necessary this time around remains to be seen - and I for one sincerely hope it doesn’t - but we cannot afford to let the Nazis go unchallenged.  If there’s one thing that literally everyone should have learned from history, that should be it.  Wherever they pop up to spread their hatred, we must be there to stamp it out.

In the long run, we must accept that people turn to the BNP because they are desperate, because they feel abandoned by the system and its incumbent leaders, and we must be there to provide an alternative.  The token anticapitalist rhetoric common to acolytes of Mussolini, Hitler and Nick Griffin shows just how important it is that the Left puts its politics forward and guide that disillusioned dissent the right way (as opposed to the Right way).  This is why, for all the frustration and the setbacks, projects like Respect and the Left List remain so important.

At the same time, it is important to keep the antifascist movements as broad as possible, and resist the urge to tie them down to any particular political project.  For all the energy we may rightfully expend opposing Labour and the Tories, they are welcome allies in the fight against fascism (like when Buffy the vampire slayer accepts help from Spike the vampire to prevent Angel from destroying the world at the end of series two, ahem).  See Lenin’s post on antifascism and the left.  And I promise to talk about something else in my next post; isn’t it high time I commented on the goings on in Latin America?

Free Access to Slavery Records

UK citizens: today is your last chance to sign this petition:

A UK company is currently placing online colonial records of 3.000.000 Africans, relating to their enslavement. This is a corporate attempt to cash in on the increased interest during the bicentenary year. African people and descendants of slaves should not have to pay for such a service. This should be a free to view document, with all records being made public so the history can be known by all. Please sign this petition to get all govenment records made available free of charge to everyone.

Off to a good start 1 - Tories in all their glory

Racist toff Boris Johnson managed to keep his racist toffery out of sight for much of his election campaign, and has probably been warned not to be too overtly arch-Tory, yet, for fear of alerting people to the threat they pose and jeopardising the predicted general election victory in a couple of years. Nevertheless, the scumbags just can’t quite resist their smug, gloaty urge to make up for 11 years lost Torying time:

(thanks Rick for the video). We’ve got so used to New Labour’s enthusiastic application of the Tory anti-union laws that it comes as a shock to be reminded how far the Tories themselves will go. Shadow chancellor George Bastard Osborne wants to further curtail the right to strike, while Tory ideologues enthuse that the time has come to smash the NUT, one of the few unions that even approaches being effective. This is, to an extent, bluster, but it will contribute to an atmosphere even more hostile to working class organisation - and no-one hates the working class more than BoJo the clown.

Can you guess, by the way, the substance of his first policy announcements? Go on, I’d give you three guesses but really one should be enough. Here it is, in all its Toriffic beauty:

Boris Johnson has pledged to tackle the “scourge” of crime on London’s transport system as a key priority in his new role as mayor of the city.

For non-Londoners (I spend probably one weekend a month in London), let me explain: London buses are now free in effect but not on paper. Their design makes it so easy to hop on and off without paying that it becomes automatic. If Ken Livingstone had been on the ball, he would have made it official: the costs would be the same, and he would have come off as spectacularly munificent rather than ineffective and easy to defraud, but it’s a bit late to be giving him advice.

Anyway, Boris has been able to turn this into a wonderful gift to his upper-middle class voters. He inflicts a massive effective price-hike on working class bus users in such a way that it is them, and not him, who come off as theiving grasping bastards. He has criminalised the users of public transport, and especially the poorer users of public transport, and especially - God love our Tory-backed boys in blue - the black people with their “gang culture” and “lack of role models” and all the rest of the racial defects that can only be cured through the liberal application of the truncheon.

LOL! OMFG WHAT A LEGEND!!!! LOL!!!!!!!!

Paul Merton and Ian Hislop have a lot to answer for.

A Test In Difficult Times

At midnight tonight, we should learn that Boris Johnson is the new mayor of London, and for me the process of watching election results come in will end 25 hours after it begun. This is the closest someone like me gets to listening to the football. Anyway I was there in Manchester town hall last night running around in a baggy pink Unite Against Fascism t-shirt (my plan had been to embarrass the BNP, but we were kept apart. In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing that I didn’t provoke the Nazis) and generally needling the more uptight representatives of the Mancunian political class (loudly referring to Labour and Lib Dem cadres as “Red Tory, Yellow Tory, Red Tory, Yellow Tory…” was fun), and ostensibly making sure no-one cheated (to justify my presence in this role, I sidled up to the nearest Lib-Dem-with-clipboard, saying “I sure hope yis are not planning on cheating ‘cos, y’know, we’re here watching”. He didn’t find it as funny as I did, pretty much exploding in my face to the bemusement of the vote-counters). A fun night was had by all, after which the intense campaigning of the last few weeks caught up with your humble narrator and his exhausted comrades.

Anyway, enough anecdote, and on to the analysis.

As you may have gathered, Labour have taken quite the beating - down to third place in terms of the total vote, behind even the Lib Dems whose performance was hardly inspiring - and the Tories look set to take the London mayor’s office and, most likely, to win at the next general election. Meanwhile the Left List have shown that we’ve survived the split of Respect and remain a force to be reckoned with, although there’s no denying that we’re still a very small party. At the other end of the spectrum, the Nazis aren’t getting quite the breakthrough they’d hoped for (update: now the London results are in, I take that back.  They’ve not broken through in Manchester, but in London they’ve made a scary amount of progress) but any progress on their part is very alarming indeed.

The results of course, are only part of the story, but they point at a major realignment of British politics.

Let’s start with London. While Johnston’s clownish Have I Got News For You persona no doubt helped him, yesterday was less a case of him winning than of Livingstone losing. While campaigning to keep his job, Livingstone seemed to have completely forgotten how he got it in the first place. He saw a challenge from the hard right, and swung rightwards to compete for the right-of-centre votes, assuming the left-leaning types would have no choice but to back him. Eight years ago, he was the one undermining New Labour’s employment of that exact same logic, providing Londoners with a real choice. This time he has deprived them of this choice, reassimilitating himself into New Labour and sounding increasingly Toryish on crime, trade unions and privatisation.

Despite his attempt to be Boris-lite, Ken remains a lot better than Boris - particularly on race relations and the environment - but even that ended up meaning very little. Even if Livingstone scraped through on second-preference votes, he would have presided over a Tory-dominated GLA and, believe it or not, had even promised to include Boris in his next cabinet. Thus, there was no way to convincingly vote against Boris; those who wanted a Tory voted actual Tory over Tory-lite and those who didn’t had little choice but to stay home. If Livingstone-2000 had stood this year, he would have wiped the floor with Johnson, Paddick and Livingstone-2008 put together.

The reasons for Labour’s decline nationally was very much the same story. Labour voters moved to the Tories and the Liberals not because they no longer wanted the party of the working class in office, but because they no longer saw Labour as the party of the working class. We never left the Labour party; the Labour party left us. Likewise, the ascent of the Liberals that seemed inevitable under the cuddly, left-leaning, antiwar (or at least “not yet entirely convinced of the case for war”) Charles Kennedy has been halted since the coup of the hard-neoliberal Orange Book crowd. The Liberals have quickly gone from siding with the solution to siding with the problem.

And so, voting Tory is not voting for the Tories, it’s the protest vote of the desperate. Even the BBC paused from its ongoing rightward journey to remark that:

we should be cautious about drawing direct parallels between Gordon Brown’s current miseries and those of the John Major in 1995. There could well be a “tipping point” for the Conservatives as there was for Labour in the mid 1990s but it hasn’t happened yet according to the opinion polls.

Perhaps one reason the Conservatives have not yet been able to marshal the level of support which rallied to Labour more than a decade ago can be found in the depressing answers to a question asked in the BBC’s election night programme opinion poll.

ICM asked respondents which party “can be trusted to keep its promises”? Some 17% said the Conservatives, 17% said Labour and 16% said the Lib Dems. But 58% said “none of them”. It doesn’t seem to be difficult to persuade people that your political opponents aren’t up to the job. But it seems much harder these days to persuade them that you are.

I don’t find that “depressing” actually; I find it heartening that people have sharpened their analysis to that point. But this is what happens when Labour are in power. When Labour are in, the problem is that even when the agents of the capitalist state are elected from the working class by the working class, they inevitably come to attack the working class. When the Tories are in, the problem is that the Tories are in. This is why we must be doubly afraid of the next Tory government; not just because they will be nastier than Labour could ever manage (and they will be), but because we will have to compete with Labour in the battle of ideas.

Anyway, let’s not jump off that bridge until we come to it. Under the Tory government, the contradictions of New Labour will fade into the background, granted, but we still have two more years of a Labour government to deal with in the meantime, and it is in this meantime that those contradictions will become more glaring than ever. The past ten years have been good to the British economy, good to the British working class, and it would have been possible to accomodate a lot of the workers’ demands if they’d been organised enough, post-Thatcher, to really make any, and even then New Labour spent more time pursuing a punitive neoliberal agenda than paying lip-service to its heartlanders (the Tories, remember, would be able to abandon even that lip-service) - so imagine what they’ll do now the joyless boom is giving way to the even less joyful bust.

We’re already seeing it, with the incomes policy - the pay freeze, the benefits squeeze, the 10p tax fraud - that has sent Gordon Brown on the sharpest popularity plummet since Neville Chamberlain failed to Stop The War, and when he promises tough leadership for tough circumstances he is promising more of the same, and harder. That’s partly because there are only so many ways for the party of big business to react to an economic slump, but more than anything because of the political landscape. The logic of triangulation will lead the Labour party leadership and many of their surviving activists to a very dangerous conclusion: that the swing towards Tory votes represents a swing towards Tory attitudes. If you thought they were trying to out-Tory the Tories before, you should see how they react to this.

With a bit of luck, the other half of the Labour party will see things differently. There are those who resigned themselves to the compromises of Old Labour long ago, but never felt quite right about the evil schemes of New Labour. In times like these, they will know exactly why they’re not getting the votes: they’ve become the party they always hated. They may have wished, for a long time, for a leftier kind of Labour, and they will see that now is the time to make it so. The New Labour project hangs together during the good times, but in a real crisis we will see a real polarisation between a leadership swinging right and a support base swinging left.

This happened, to an extent, with the Iraq war. Then, as now, a lot of us swore off ever voting Labour again, and we saw some high-profile dissent: Robin Cook resigned from his position, Clare Short resigned from the party, and George Galloway went right over to what we hoped would become the new left. This rebellion was much too small to amount to anything big, and the Respect party had already fallen short of our wildest hopes long before a significant chunk of it cracked off under the weight of Galloway’s ego. However, we’re already seeing much more discontent and disillusion than we did then, with even the most loyal of Labourites starting to look tentatively leftwards.

The first voter I met at the polling station on election day came straight out with the question: “are you Labour?!” He was very disappointed, it turned out, that no representatives of the Labour Party were present because he’d got up especially to shout at them for privatising his council house. We’d campaigned heavily against the council house privatisation, and in the end we convinced him that a Left List vote would make his point more effectively. Our campaigning struck a chord with a lot of disaffected Labour voters, and even some of those that didn’t quite make the jump confessed to have had a really tough time making the decision, congratulated us and even thanked us for dragging the debate leftwards after decades of it drifting toward the right.

Then there’s the trade unions, the crucial link between Labour and the working class vote. So far, the unions to really stand up to the pay freeze have been those that weren’t linked to Labour in the first place, and the joint action we’ve seen recently gives me hope that they could be at the heart of a new alignment; Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS union, has already given the Left List a hearty endorsement. Such unions remain the exception, rather than the rule. My stepmum’s union just endorsed the pay freeze, while mine didn’t stop at telling me to vote Labour, it even invited me to a social where Hazel Blears, the bane of Salford, will teach us how the party and the union can work together more effectively. Bleurgh.

But then, my stepmum left her union in disgust, and I’m seriously thinking of doing the same. This is one half of the unions’ state of flux; the other is, as industrial action and class action become more of an issue, that workers are joining unions with precisely these things on their mind. Given a significant victory for the fighting unions and their political allies, and I think the bureaucrats who insist on backing Labour through thick and thin (who, let’s face it, would vote Labour even if Gordon Brown bombed their houses and shot their kids because, after all, it’s better than having a Tory bomb your house and shoot your kids) will find themselves very isolated indeed. That victory is what we’re waiting for. We point at our campaign to save council houses, and the council houses weren’t saved; we point at the united strikes against the pay freeze, and the pay freeze wasn’t broken. This hurts our argument, but just wait until we can show that is it an option to fight the power, it is an option to win!

As revolutionaries, we like elections but we don’t love them. This has been a chance for us to engage with the class, and a chance for them to guage the standing of the different parties. The important part begins now, now that Labour have been fully discredited, now that we can build an alternative - so that when the Tory government does come in, we’ll be ready to take them on. This has happened in France already - we were terrified of what the Sarkozy government would do, but they’ve barely been able to get away with anything - and there’s no reason we can’t make it happen here too.

Update:

The London results were worse than even I had feared. Not only is Boris in, but the BNP have got a seat on the assembly and even the National Front are coming out of the woodwork with tens of thousands of votes. The Left List, meanwhile, got creamed - only in two constituencies did we break through the 3% barrier, and in many we failed to get even 1% - but in the one constituency where the faction that got to keep the Respect name was standing they actually did rather well.

I think the message to take home is this: in Manchester, Birmingham and Sheffield, where we could effectively canvass and reach out to people, Left List did very well. In London, no-one had heard of the new name, and still looked for Respect; where they saw the Respect name, that candidate did very well.

Politically, this shows that a Left-of-Labour challenge can still be very credible. Practically, it means that it will be more difficult for the Left List to claim that credibility in the eyes of the class, the unions, and those who Labour has abandoned, especially as more of those eyes will be on London than on Preston or Bolton. The kind of left realignment I talked about will be much harder than it would have been without the split.

But what can you do? All this means is that the we’ll have to be even more serious about building a movement when the elections aren’t on - especially during the strike wave that is surely coming and, looking at the London votes, by building antifascist demos - and really that’s where we should be focusing our energies anyway. Still…

May Day Greetings from the West Coast

Ok, I’m not in America, I’m in Manchester recovering from a night needling the political class at the count and several weeks frantic election activity running up to that. We did pretty well, since you ask, but I’ll doubtless tell you more when the (potentially catastrophic) London results are in.

In the meantime, let me share this with you:

ILWU shuts down docks for May Day

Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky report on plans for the West Coast dockworkers’ antiwar action.

OAKLAND, Calif.–Dockworkers voted to shut down West Coast ports on May 1 to protest the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

On May Day 2008, container ships will sit idle at all 29 ports on the West Coast. From San Diego to Seattle, the giant “hammerhead” cranes that lift cargo containers on and off ships will stand motionless.

Every dock in California, Oregon and Washington will grow quiet as 25,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) lay down their tools and walk off the job “to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of troops from the Middle East.”

The ILWU’s longshore caucus voted to use a clause in its contract that allows the union to call “stop work” meetings for union business. The ILWU motion authorizing the shutdown argues, “It is time to take labor’s protest to a more powerful level of struggle by calling on unions and working people in the U.S. and internationally to mobilize for a ‘No Peace No Work Holiday’ May 1, 2008.”

This is the first time in decades that a union in this country has taken industrial action against a U.S. war. It is doubly significant that the ILWU chose to do so on May Day, the International Workers’ Day, which is typically not honored in the U.S.

The ILWU motion is noteworthy because it also takes the Democrats to task for continuing to fund the war and encompasses a wider condemnation as the U.S. “imperial” interventions in the Middle East.

Jack Heyman, a dockworker in Oakland, Calif., and a union officer, reports in the San Francisco Chronicle that the debate generated by the resolution was spirited and impassioned. Heyman credits the union’s Vietnam veterans with turning the tide of opinion in favor of the antiwar resolution.

In San Francisco, the ILWU has also called for a march and rally on May Day, which includes the following demands: a withdrawal of the troops now, health care for all, funding for schools and housing and a defense of civil liberties and workers’ rights. In an effort to build bridges with immigrant workers, who will also be marching on May Day, the ILWU calls for “no scapegoating of immigrant workers for the economic crisis.”

The ILWU is no stranger to political action. The union was one of the first to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the first major U.S. union to oppose the Vietnam War. The ILWU expressed hopes that its historical action on the docks would serve as a clarion call to all of labor to put some teeth into the many antiwar resolutions that unions have passed.

The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) Branch 214 in San Francisco has requested its members observe two minutes of silence in all its stations on May Day in solidarity with the ILWU. NACL Branch 630 in Greensboro, N.C., did likewise. The New York Metro Area Postal Workers, a local of the American Postal Workers Union, followed suit.

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 2334 at City University of New York voted to undertake a campus event or teach-in on May Day in solidarity of the ILWU. Support has also come from the Vermont AFL-CIO, the San Francisco Labor Council and SEIU Local 1021.

Of course, the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), the West Coast employer association of shipowners, stevedore companies and terminal operators, opposes the action.

The coastwide dock shut down in opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also serves as the first volley to this year’s contract negotiations between the ILWU and the port bosses. The contract between the PMA and the ILWU is set to expire July 1. During the last round of negotiations in 2002, George W. Bush invoked the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act during a 12-day PMA lockout of the ILWU.

Have it! According to the token coverage in the mainstream media, they really did shut down the West Coast for a day: LA Times, NY Times, Reuters.

Left List in Rusholme and Levenshulme

Don’t forget to vote.

Here’s Sue, our candidate for Levenshulme and Gorton South:

In Gorton South as first timers I think we have run a fantastically energetic campaign including attending a very lively hustings meeting organised by the Friends of Levenshulme group on Saturday. The 3 minute introductory speeches by the candidates have been transcribed and MP3 versions are all available (or will be) on the Friends of Levy website www.levenshulme.wetpaint.com. We really have got the rest of the candidates worried because we are the only ones talking any politics and any sense in fact!

The response on the doorstep also reinforces the fact that we are opening up a gap in Gorton South politics. On Sunday our canvassers had a great time including coming across a street full of health workers who know about Karen Reissmanns dispute and were voting for us already on the basis of the first leaflet. Knocking on doors now is more about motivating people to actually get to the polling booths on Thursday. We have already convinced many people that they should vote for us but they are delighted that someone is actually making an effort to call on them.

And here’s Nahella, for Rusholme:

See also an endorsement of the Left List from Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS union.

Love Music, Hate Racism, and Fuck the Nazis

With a turnout comfortably above 100,000, the Love Music Hate Racism carnival was the biggest anti-fascist event in British history.  It was also a great musical day out, too, The Good The Bad and The Queen put on the closest thing I’ll ever see to a Clash gig, followed by an epic orchestral version of Ghost Town led by Jerry Dammers late of the Specials.  I was also pleased to take part in chants of “Fuck the BNP”.  With Stop The War, we rarely get to swear.

Hopefully, this will have boosted the anti-fash voter turnout enough to keep the Nazis from getting their seat on the Greater London Assembly, and the Left List had a big enough presence to win around a lot of those otherwise too disillusioned by Labour to bother voting.  A bit more news coverage would have been welcome; I’m getting used to the news blackouts of popular protest, but come on, throw us a bone…

See Lenin’s Tomb for more detail on the anti-fascist vote and the left.

Troops Out (of Manchester) Now!

On the one hand, five years of horrible and unpopular wars have made a lot of people not want to join the military.  On the other hand, ten years of horrible and unpopular economic policies (with the current crisis as the icing on the cake) has made a lot of people quite desperate.  Hence the intensified drive to recruit, especially targeting students, ethnic minorities and working class children.

And hence, after UCL and the NUT, it’s Manchester’s turn to kick them off campus.  Well, we’ll be voting on it at the next general meeting on Wednesday, and hopefully it will pass.  It’s already provoked some hysterical flak from the Manchester Evening News and the BBC (although that’s nothing compared to the rightwing counterattack that UCL students have had to face).

The text of the motion follows below the fold.  We’ll also be voting to commit the union to a fight for a free education - equally important given the fees review this year, and the right’s victory in the elections to the union executive.