Lead story

LABOUR HITS BACK AT NETANYAHU

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

LABOUR’S LEADERS hit back at Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli premier, this week after his poisonous anti-Corbyn comments were splashed all over the bourgeois press. Jeremy Corbyn denounced Israel’s war-crimes and his Number 2, John McDonnell said “enough is enough” following Netanyahu’s intervention in internal British politics in support of the hysterical Blairite and Zionist campaign to oust Corbyn that has been going on for the past three years Corbyn is backed by the Jewish Voice of Labour movement, an affiliate of the Labour Representation Committee, which said: “It is extraordinary that no Parliamentarian has raised concerns about this ongoing intervention by a foreign power in domestic political affairs”. The Israeli leader claimed that Corbyn had laid a wreath at the graves of members of Black September responsible for the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1974 Munich Olympics during a memorial service in Tunis in 2014. Netanyahu also claimed that Corbyn had compared to Israel to the Nazis. Black September was a dissident Palestinian guerrilla group founded in 1971 that was responsible for terror attacks on Israeli targets around the world until it was shut down by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1973. But Corbyn could not honour the graves of those responsible for the Munich attack when he was in Tunisia. They were killed in Munich and their graves are in Libya. Corbyn said: “Israeli PM Netanyahu’s claims about my actions and words are false. What deserves unequivocal condemnation is the killing of over 160 Palestinian protesters in Gaza by Israeli forces since March, including dozens of children — and a discriminatory nation state law sponsored by his government that formalises the second class status of Arab citizens,”
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Workers’ Notes Fascists flee at Bookmarks rally

by Theo Russell

FASCISTS wearing blackshirts with Nazi-style logos were given a taste of their own medicine when they tried to disrupt a meeting called in support of the London bookshop vandalised by Nazis and racists a week earlier. A small group of supporters of the Football Lads Alliance (FLA) and Generation Identity gathered outside shouting abuse, but they were immediately chased several blocks away by an angry crowd chanting “fascist scum — off our streets!”. London comrades joined many other anti-fascists last Saturday to show their solidarity with Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop which is the official bookseller for the TUC. Hundreds came for the rally at the nearby Bloomsbury Baptist Church to show solidarity after the shop was ransacked by a group of Nazis and racists the previous week. Three UKIP members have been suspended after 12 men, one wearing a Donald Trump mask, jeered Muslims and called the shop staff “traitors”. Noel Halifax, who was one of the two staff in the shop on the day of the attack, said that the last time Bookmarks had been targeted was in the 1970s. “The National Front was around then, and it feels like that kind of atmosphere today

Tribute to forgotten war-time Chinese workers

Xinhua

THE TENS of thousands of Chinese men who played a key, but largely forgotten, role in the first World War were remembered at a ceremony in Liverpool last week. The event was called to remember the almost 100,000 members of the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) who were recruited by the British government during the 1914-1918 conflict. Mark Blundell, Lord Lieutenant of Merseyside, addressed a large gathering at Liverpool’s Anfield cemetery where five members of the CLC are buried. The audience included high-ranking British military officers, civic leaders, representatives from the Chinese Consulate General in Manchester, and members of Chinese organisations in Britain.

Tory Christmas spirit

by New Worker correspondent

DEMANDS for increased holiday time are often part of trade union demands. But in the land of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Somerset County Council have gone one better and demanded that workers take two days unpaid leave over the Christmas break in 2018 and 2019 to save £500,000 each year. Unite the Union has called on its members to reject the plan in a ballot next month. Regional secretary Steve Preddy said: “This crisis is entirely of this Tory-controlled council’s own making. If it had taken the advice of its financial advisors and raised council tax in line with inflation in recent years, the budget would now be running a surplus. “And now when Theresa May’s government has indicated that it was allegedly relaxing its attitude to public sector pay, here in Somerset, the true ugly face of Conservatism has been revealed with this move to salami slice holidays.” The Chief Executive of the County Council smugly claimed that the council was not in danger of going down the route of Northamptonshire County Council, which recently issued a second Section 114 notice, effectively freezing all unnecessary spending. He claimed that: “Northamptonshire’s failure was they did not understand their position, they didn’t put plans in place. They did too little, too late.” So that makes it all right effectively to cut workers’ pay.

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Editorial

Corbyn stands up to Zionism !

Corbyn stands up to Zionism JEREMY Corbyn has, at last, responded to the intervention of the Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the internal politics of the Labour Party. Netanyahu poses as defending Jewish communities around the world. But the Zionist leader remained silent when his friend, Donald Trump, endorsed neo-Nazis and racists last year. And the reactionary Israeli leader had no qualms in cosying up to the Hungarian premier who whitewashes Hungary’s fascist role during the Second World War and has launched an anti-Semitic campaign against George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier accusing of funding opposition to the Budapest government. The anti-Corbyn hate campaign has gone unchallenged for far too long. Rank and file opposition to the Blairites and Zionists inside the labour movement is the only way we can combat the lies and filth of the bourgeois media.

False promises for rough sleepers

THIS WEEK the May government unveiled what they claimed was a £100 million plan to help people living on the street. The Tory minister for housing claimed that this would end rough sleeping by 2027. But Labour soon exposed it as a hollow sham when it transpired that it would be paid for out of existing funds. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn blasted the plans for containing “no new money” and homelessness organisations have urged that the strategy should go further. The sight of people sleeping in shop doorways in major towns and cities across Britain was once commonplace during the Thatcher era. The numbers went down during Blair and Brown’s Labour governments — but it has once again become a familiar sight under the Tories’ austerity regime

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