Public Meeting: 1989 – the year the walll fell

Debate: Can capitalism stop climate change?

University accommodation scandal

Students must defend rights

Around 800 first-year students at De Montfort University in Leicester have been forced into hotels around the city after the university ‘ran out of space’ in halls. Many of the students were told that they were guaranteed a place after they applied in May and June but were then informed, some just two days before they were to move in, that they did not in fact have a place and were going to be put into temporary accommodation.

By Becci Heaghney, Leicester Socialist Students

Some students were housed in private accommodation but, as one student told us, the houses were not suitable. There were reports of windows not closing, front doors not opening and boilers being unsafe.

How can we fight the racist BNP?

QUB Socialist Society Public Meeting

How can we fight the racist BNP?

1pm Wed 7th Oct
Room 207 PFC

Keep the Racist BNP Off TV!

Youth Against Racism has organised a protest against the BBC’s invitation to the far-right, racist BNP to participate in Question Time. The protest will take place at 5.30pm on Thursday 15th October outside BBC Broadcasting House, Ormeau Avenue, Belfast.

The BBC have offered the BNP a platform on Question Time. The far-right BNP won 2 seats in the recent European elections. This party is attempting to develop a respectable image, but their core is out-right fascism. Their founder called Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ his ‘Bible’ and Nick Griffin, the current leader, regularly denied the Holocaust.

Socialist Society Public Meetings

University of Ulster
Coleraine – 4pm Wed 23rd September
SU Bar

Jordanstown – 4pm Thurs 24th September
Site Executive Office 

Queen’s University
1pm Thursday 1st October
Room 203 PFC

Socialist Society Statement Sept 09 Scrap Fees, fight the cuts!

• Cut backs in many faculties
• Creche services under threat in University of Ulster
• Fight the privatisation and cuts in education

While Queens vice-chancellor Peter Gregson lives on a salary of over £200,000 after receiving a wage increase of £24k, he still expect students to pay up to £10,000 for the right to an education. Gregson, who has claimed expenses on his membership of the prestigious London gentleman’s club, Athenaeum, has also introduced vicious cutbacks that will result in the loss of 104 staff and the closure of the German and Gender Studies departments.
Across all University of Ulster campuses there is a real danger crèche facilities could be facing either closure or instead be privatised. If privatisation goes ahead, this will lead to rip-off charges which most students cannot afford. Closure will result in removing the option of most young parents thinking of going to university.

But the university bosses and the government have no problem cutting more people out of education. This year the government only created 13,000 new places despite the fact that 60,000 more people applied for university than last year.

The Socialist Society has played a leading role in organising protests against the attacks on our education system and for the scrapping of tuition fees. The government will point to a £200 million blackhole in university funding claiming the money is not there. But the money is very clearly there when we look at the £140 billion in bailouts that the British government has given to bankers that have caused the present economic crisis. That’s enough to fill 7,000 such holes. Or what about the £73 billion wasted on Trident nuclear weapons? That’s enough to fill 3,000 such holes.

The Socialist Society at Queens and University of Ulster will continue to campaign for free education and students’ rights, but will also raise the need for a genuine socialist alternative to capitalist crisis. To get active with the Socialist Society on your campus, contact us at socialistsociety@hotmail.com

Xinjiang: Brutal policing triggers deadly riot

140 killed and 800 injured in worst ethnic clashes for decades in China’s Muslim-majority region.

Vincent Kolo, chinaworker.info

A peaceful sit-down protest in the capital city Ürümqi by around 300 Uighurs, the Turkic-speaking minority that is the dominant population group in Xinjiang, was transformed by trigger-happy police into perhaps the most serious ethnic clashes seen in decades. Xinjiang, known as East Turkestan to many Uighurs, has seen ethnic tensions rise as a result of Chinese state repression that went into overdrive after “9/11” and the global “war on terror”, discrimination of non-Chinese speakers, and a yawning wealth gap that puts the indigenous population at the bottom.

Where now for the Iranian revolution?

Working class must decisively enter struggle

Tony Saunois, Committee for a Workers’ International

Thirty years after the 1979 revolution Iran has again erupted in revolutionary convulsions as millions have taken to the streets to protest against the undoubted rigging of the Presidential election. Within a few hours of polls closing, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his cohorts in the theocratic dictatorship claimed a sweeping victory of 64% of the votes cast based on an 85% turn-out.

This pronouncement was enough to bring hundreds of thousands onto the streets – according to some reports up to three million participated in the largest protest which has taken place in Tehran. Students, the middles class and sections of unemployed, the poor and white collar workers have flooded onto the streets demanding that they reclaim their “stolen votes” and that Ahmadinejad is driven from office. However this revolutionary crisis unfolds in the coming weeks, it is clear that Iran will never be the same again. This massive movement for change marks the beginning of the end of the existing dictatorship.

Sri Lanka – United Socialist Party leader on death list

Days of victory celebrations humiliating all Tamils

Elizabeth Clarke, Committee for a Workers’ International

The Committee for a Workers’ International has received a copy of a vile communication put out by Sinhala chauvinist hate-mongers in the wake of the defeat of the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam. Amongst the portraits of those they want killed are NGO activists, Indian politicians and five Sri Lankan politicians including Siritunga Jayasuriya, Secretary of the United Socialist Party (CWI Sri Lanka).

As readers of this site will know, the USP has maintained a courageous stand in defence of the rights of all Tamil-speaking people and for a united struggle against land-lordism, capitalism and imperialism with socialist policies. It has had its criticisms of the methods and approach of the LTTE, but has spoken out against the war-mongering of the Rajapakse regime and the slaughter of thousands of Tamil civilians. It has also spoken out against the vast and inhumane camps in which the government is holding prisoner hundreds of thousands of refugees.