Lead story

Elitism V Socialism

by Daphne Liddle

TRISTRAM Hunt, the Blairite Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent, last week told an audience of students at Cambridge University Labour Club that they were the “top one per cent” and needed to show leadership within the party. “The way you serve the Corbyn leadership is to be as dissenting and creative as possible,” he told the students, according to the Cambridge University newspaper Varsity.

“You are the top one per cent. The Labour Party is in the shit. It is your job and your responsibility to take leadership going forward,” he added.

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Elitism V Socialism

Southern Rail talks collapse again

THE COMPANY behind Southern Rail, Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), last Monday dismissed out of hand a set of proposals from the RMT transport union to resolve the current dispute over keeping fully trained guards on all trains.

These proposals included:

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Southern Rail talks collapse again

Editorial

Black lives do matter

YET ANOTHER black man has died at the hands of the police. This time it was former Aston Villa football star Dalian Atkinson, who died after being tasered by police outside his father’s home in Telford, Shropshire. According to first reports it seems he had been behaving strangely and aggressively towards his father.

Then accounts of the event came from a neighbour, Paula Quinn, a white working class woman with no motive for bending the truth. She was interviewed on camera by the BBC’s Sian Lloyd. She told Lloyd that Atkinson had been stumbling towards the police in a disturbed but non-aggressive way. They told him to stop and threatened to Taser him. He stumbled, seemingly oblivious, and they tasered him. Quinn said he fell to the ground “like a lead balloon”.

That use of the Taser might just have been justified if the police had thought they were in danger from Atkinson — though they are trained to subdue people in that state without recourse to tasering.

Everything that followed, as described by Quinn, was not justified. She said that whilst he lay helpless on the ground: “They were shouting and kicking so much all I could hear were the boots hitting him. And then the officer who released the Taser stepped back while the other officer still continued to kick and then I could hear him shout to the other officer that was still kicking, ‘Back off, back off, back off.’ “And then the officer with the Taser asked the gentleman to put his hands behind his back [so they could handcuff him] and did so probably two or three times and reactivated the Taser another four or five times after that.”

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Black lives do matter