Workers Solidarity Movement

Around 50 people attended a lunch time vigil today organised by the Belfast Trade and District Council. A range of political organisations and unions attended including the Independent Workers Union, the WSM and Organise!  During the rally one speaker from the council also referred to the police being workers too. This will provide little comfort to working people on the receiving end of state violence and terror.

Northern Ireland unemployment figures rise again as our local sectarian politicians engage in petty point-scoring over the latest hot potato that dominates the political discourse. Latest figures have revealed that the number of people claiming unemployment benefits in July was 63,200, an increase of 400 with this figure being the second highest among the 12 UK regions. The NI rate now stands at 7.6% with that figure rising again once you include the fact that over 20% of the population our classed as ‘economically in-active’- the highest in the UK.

Marx in Soho, written in 1999 by historian Howard Zinn and author of the ‘Peoples History of the United States’, is presented by the Just Books Collective and is a one-man play on the life of Karl Marx.  Zinn stated that he wrote the play to "show Marx as few people knew him, as a family man, struggling to support his wife and children." The play depicts Marx resurrected to defend the ideals of communism from the dehumanized version of it practiced in the former Soviet Union and to defend humanity from capitalism.

In April this year over 100 bus drivers took successful wildcat action bringing Belfast city centre to a standstill in solidarity with a work colleague who was wrongly suspended by management without using the proper procedures.  Independent Workers Union and WSM member Sean Matthews speaks to one anonymous driver from Translink about the action taken, wider working conditions and the possibility of solidarity and

A huge secretive Garda security operation last night swung into operation in Dublin Port as Shell's Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) left the port as part of a huge convoy of Garda vehicles.  News of the operation had leaked at the last minute meaning that with only an hours notice a handful of Shell to Sea campaigners managed to get down to the port entrance despite the pouring rain.  Most of us were pulled over and questioned by Garda at least once and the Garda helicopter stayed overhead as various Garda vehicles including a van load of riot cops with the door open drove past us repeatedly.

About 700 people from all over Ireland took part in a evening march to the Dail last night to highlight the ongoing resistance to the attempt to impose the Household tax.  Although smaller than recent CAHWT protests because the march was at 5 o'clock on a working day in July it was still of significant size.  The timing was because this was the last day the Dail sits.  Below is a slideshow of photos our photographer took on the demonstration, many more photos will be found in our Facebook album of the march which you are encouraged to share.  There is a video of the march in the body of the article, click through to view it.

Saturday's Youth Defense march in Belfast saw a WSM member arrested for protesting the presence of Michael Quinn, the fascist who told the Sunday World that he would "he would have "no problem" with an Anders Breivik style-massacre" in Ireland. When Quinn was pointed out to stewards on the so called 'Rally for Life' they protected him and allowed him to continue on the march. On Sunday Youth Defence deleted posts of the picture of Quinn on the demonstration from their Facebook page and banned people who posted the picture or demanded to know why they had allowed Quinn to march. 

The handshake that lasted 3.7 seconds kept the broadcast media on knife-edge as the crowning moment of the so-called peace process. However, beneath the carefully choreographed piece of political theatre is a settlement built on sand, on managing sectarianism and regulating division, rather than confronting and removing the causes of conflict in our society.

The WSM took part in Pride in Dublin over the weekend as part of the PINC! bloc. Below are a selection of images of the day captured by our photographers.

We've made a much larger collection available via the Pride 2012 album on the WSM Facebook page.  The slideshow above is a smaller selection of these images pulled from our photographers Flickr account. Images made available under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.

David Cameron plans to end housing benefit for claimants aged 16-24. The ‘proposal’ forms part of wider recommendations to begin being implemented next year as part of the new Welfare Act. Further plans being rolled out including linking regional play with regional benefits, breaking the link between benefits and inflation, and considering linking benefits to average earnings and cost of living amounting to a further attack on worker’s rights and conditions.