Lead story

Syrian troops smash rebels

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

SYRIAN troops have resumed their siege of rebel-held western Aleppo after a successful drive to push the terrorists off a key road into the city. Russian war-planes carried out more than 100 sorties in support of the Syrian offensive that ended in victory this week. Syrian forces, backed by Lebanese and Iraqi volunteers, have now regained control of the only open road left to the rebel-held enclave.

In northern Syria the Turks continue to advance whilst a British delegation renewed calls for peace after meeting the Syrian president, Bashar al Assad, in Damascus. But the imperialist-backed rebels struck back with a wave of terror bombings that rocked key Syrian cities on Monday.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned the bombings, saying they were a continuation of the systematic terrorism practised by the terrorist groups in Syria. It urged the UN Security Council to undertake “deterrent” measures against the countries that support the terrorist groups, naming Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and France as patrons of the terror groups.

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Syrian troops smash rebels

Rights not games

by New Worker correspondent

IT IS NOW just one year since the Independent Living Fund (ILF) was abolished and the responsibility for supporting people with disabilities to live an independent life was handed over to local authorities to administer on a means-tested basis as PIP (personal independence payments).

These required case-by-case assessments making them expensive to administer and funding was not ring-fenced. Claimants have found themselves lucky to get half the support they used to get, and many have lost jobs and personal independence as a result.

The Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) campaign has marked the sad anniversary with a busy Week of Action and the publication of One Year On: a report into the impact of the closure of the Independent Living Fund by Inclusion London. <

The Week of Action is also timed to coincide with the start of the Paralympics in Brazil.

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Rights not games

Editorial

Stop the Labour purge

BACK in the old days ballot-rigging, vote massaging and smear campaigns were commonplace within the union movement, whilst the Labour Party openly operated a system of bans and proscriptions to keep out communists and those they dubbed “fellow travellers” that was maintained until the early 1970s.

Though the bourgeois media regularly accused the communists of vote manipulation it was, in fact, the chosen tactic of the right-wing blocs throughout the labour movement.

Some believed that we had seen the last of these dubious practices with the end of the Cold War. The events over the past few weeks have clearly proved them wrong. Labour members and supporters are being suspended or banned from voting on a colossal scale in the current leadership contest by the right-wing bureaucracy in a blatant effort to stop the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn.

The right-wing clique working in Labour’s shadowy Compliance Unit has suspended leading labour movement figures such as Ronnie Draper, general secretary of the Baker’s Union — a Labour affiliate — other long-standing members and thousands of new, young recruits that Corbyn has won over since his original election victory last year.

The purge is being carried out in the name of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC). But the NEC is in no position to investigate or even review the cases of potentially hundreds or thousands of suspended Labour members. It is not in continuous session and it last met in July. In fact Labour’s unelected general secretary, Iain McNicol, and the unelected Compliance Unit are responsible for the present outrages.

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Stop the Labour purge