On July 18, Ford Australia president Tom Gorman announced that Ford's Geelong engine plant would close in 2010, putting 600 workers out of work. Geelong Trades Hall Council's Union Air radio show interviewed Australian Manufacturing Workers Union vehicle division delegate plant Tony Anderson.
718
On July 17 the British House of CommonsÂ’ standards and privileges committee recommended the suspension of George Galloway, the former Labour MP who is now an MP for the left-wing Respect coalition, for 18 days. Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 because of his opposition to the Iraq war.
At least 500 Teleco workers received termination letters on July 6 as part of the governmentÂ’s announced plan to privatise the company.
The head of Britain’s Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has called for police to be given the power to imprison “terror suspects” indefinitely without charge.
The “anti-terror” hysteria in the lead-up to the Sydney APEC summit in September has been ramped up still further — this time by Lord Mayor Clover Moore.
This is an abridged version of a motion adopted by the national leadership of FranceÂ’s Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).
An article in GLW #717 incorrectly listed Cheryl Kaulfuss as the chair of MelbourneÂ’s July 14 rally for Indigenous rights. The chair was Shiralee Hood. An article in the same edition described Wally Curran as a metalworkersÂ’ union leader. Curran was a long-time leader of the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union.
The election of Nicolas Sarkozy as France’s president in April and the landslide to the conservatives in the first round of the parliamentary elections on June 10, described in France as the “blue wave”, were widely presented in the Australian capitalist media as a dramatic shift to the right in French political life. They are all too keen to wipe out last year’s images of French workers and students successfully resisting anti-worker laws, something they only grudgingly reported on in the first place.
Australians Brendan Hurst and Justin Saint were recently killed in a roadside attack near Baghdad. They had been working for the Queensland-registered security firm BLP International as contractors training Iraqi police.
The revolutionary student movement in Venezuela is divided into countless tiny organisations, often with bases in just one faculty or one campus. One of these organisations, the Popular Revolutionary Movement of Fire (MPR Fogata), in a statement issued in June called for “the revolutionary student movement of Venezuela to strengthen the forces in favour of unity”. The statement argued: “Now we are presented with the possibility of deepening these forces and gradually making that [unity] a reality.”
The French presidential and parliamentary elections produced very contradictory results for the broadly defined radical left. Its collective vote of a little less than 9% in the presidential poll, while large compared to other industrialised countries, was down from 15% in 2002. However the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) bucked the trend and cemented its position as the most credible voice of the anti-capitalist left.
[Abridged from a presentation by Raul Bassi, on behalf of the Socialist Alliance, to a conference hosted by the Venezuelan embassy in Sydney on July 7.]
- Previous page
- Page 3
- Next page