THE NEW WORKER

The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 28th July 2017


National News

The passing of Mary Turner

MARY TURNER, the long-standing president of the GMB union and Labour Party executive member, died last week. The GMB Union sadly announced that she passed away after a short illness on 19th July.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said she had “paved the way for so many women in the union movement” and former GMB general secretary Paul Kenny described her as the most outstanding woman trade unionist of her generation.

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Union urges Government to resolve Southern dispute

RMT, the transport union that organises most railway workers, has urged Transport Minister Chris Grayling to resolve Southern dispute and prevent similar disputes spreading across the network.

RMT General Secretary Mick Cash met the Secretary of State last week for talks to try to reach a settlement. Cash called on the Tory minister to direct Southern to break the deadlock in the long-running Southern Rail dispute by agreeing an accessibility guarantee that would mean passengers on all affected services are assured of assistance from on-board service staff without the need to book in advance.

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Grenfell tragedy reveals vicious class war of the rich against the rest

by Theo Russell

EXTRAORDINARY events have taken place in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Britain’s wealthiest borough, in the weeks since the Grenfell Tower tragedy: a town hall invasion, the resignations of the borough’s Chief Executive and Tory Council Leader, and the Tory-led council under siege from every side.

These events followed close on the heels of the election of a Labour MP for the first time since the constituency was created in 1974. But the Grenfell Tower fire has also had a massive political impact nationally, showing that the reality of the Tory austerity policy is a vicious class war being waged by the rich against the rest.

Grenfell, together with Labour’s superb general election campaign, which made austerity the number one issue, has helped to trigger a national debate about endless cuts, inequality and class injustice.

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Scottish Political News

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

TWO OF Scotland’s leading political failures have been trying to make careers beyond politics.

First Jim Murphy, the Blairite former leader of the Scottish Labour Party (for seven months in 2014—2015 in case nobody noticed). After losing his seat in 2015 he set up an international affairs consultancy, Arden Strategies Ltd. This has been such a success it made him a profit of £3,692, ie £10 per day between October 2015 and October 2016. The company’s website says he led Scottish Labour into the 2015 General Election but, perhaps for reasons of space, does not mention the result. Murphy describes himself as a “recognised problem solver with exceptional communication skills.” Modestly he says nothing of who created the problems for Scottish Labour in the first place.

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Labour after the election

by New Worker correspondent

THAT WAS the theme of the panel of speakers who opened a New Worker meeting at the Cock Tavern in central London on Friday 7th July. Chaired by Theo Russell, the panel included NCP leader Andy Brooks and Gerry Downing of Socialist Fight, who was expelled by Labour on trumped-up charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ last year, and Marie Lynam, a Posadist who is a Labour Party activist and supporter of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC).

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A great communist leader

by New Worker correspondent

COMRADES and friends met at the John Buckle Centre in south London on Thursday 6th July to mark the 23rd anniversary of the passing of President Kim Il Sung on 8th July, 1994, and to discuss the tense situation on the Korean peninsula following the recent American threats to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

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Guildford: Surrey’s other capital

by Carole Barclay

GUILDFORD is in the heart of the ‘stockbroker belt’ that houses the wealthy commuters who work the money markets of the City of London. Visitors may assume that the University of Surrey and the impressive modernist cathedral on the hill gives Guildford ‘county town’ status. In fact Surrey’s administration centre is Kingston-on-Thames, which left Surrey to join Greater London back in 1965. But you could easily be forgiven for thinking that this is the real capital of Surrey when you walk down the high street of this prosperous market town in the heart of southern Toryland.

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International News

Turkish opposition condemns government meddling in Syria

Sputnik

THE LEADER of the largest opposition political party in Turkey has sharply criticised Ankara’s foreign policy, especially regarding the Syrian conflict and the Qatari diplomatic crisis.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which is the main opposition party in the Turkish Parliament, said his country now has serious problems with many other countries.

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Reagan and Gorbachev v Stalin and Roosevelt

by Dmitry Nersesov

PROFESSOR Edward Lozansky, the president of the American University in Moscow, has assessed the results of the recent diplomatic negotiations between Russia and the United States as “inconclusive”. But it would be strange to expect deputy foreign ministers of Russia and the USA to make any final decisions regarding the matter of the Russian diplomatic property that was seized in the United States.

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BRICS Trade Union Forum opens in Beijing

by Liangyu

THE SIXTH BRICS Trade Union Forum kicked off in Beijing, the capital of China, on Monday 24th July. The five BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, are home to 42 per cent of the world’s population. Their total share in the global economy has risen from 12 per cent to 23 per cent in the past decade, whilst contributing more than half of global growth.

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Defending freedom? What else?

by Rob Gowland

AUSTRALIAN Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, speaking in France after the G20 summit in Germany, made much of the fact that in 1916 Australians came from — as he put it — the other end of the world to fight in France “in defence of freedom”.

The problem with that cosy notion, of course, is that they did no such thing. The Australians had just been ignominiously withdrawn from Gallipoli where they had played the lead role in the failed Anglo-French attempt to sever the Turkish empire from its German and Austro-Hungarian allies. The Australian soldiers, of course, had been told that they were fighting “the Turk” in the interests of Western civilisation and to oppose aggression (by Turkey in the Middle East and by Germany in Europe).

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Features

Why the bourgeois media mourns Liu Xiaobo

by Stephen Millies

THE WORLD capitalist media has been filled with tributes to Liu Xiaobo and attacks on the People’s Republic of China. Liu, who was convicted of counter-revolutionary acts in 2009, died of liver cancer on 13th July in Shenyang.

The Economist magazine’s front cover calls Liu “China’s conscience.” What did Liu stand for?

Liu supported the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He declared: “No matter what, the war against Saddam Hussein is just! The decision by President Bush is right.” Liu also supported the US wars against Korea and Vietnam, which killed millions of people.

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The Last Liberal

by Zoltan Zigedy

THE YEAR 1989 marked the death of the independent journalist, Isidor Feinstein (IF) Stone, the last 20th century US liberal. Liberalism in the last century combined the liberties of the original Bill of Rights with Roosevelt’s proposed Second Bill of Rights.

By mid-century, US liberalism reached its greatest heights, supplementing the historic bourgeois rights that dismantled feudalism and enshrined the right to property with the promise of an entirely new set of economic rights — rights to employment, housing, medical care, social security, education, amongst others. The economic rights sought to codify the social democratic gains made in the New Deal era.

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