IV510 - July 2017

A nondescript district in the centre of this vast country has suddenly become a most sought after destination for politicians and media people. Lamentably, this transformation has come at the cost of human lives. Farmers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh started their protests since June 1 demanding higher crop prices and debt relief. This was no great news since popular protests from the peasantry have erupted time and again in different parts of the country demanding crop prices and debt-relief as the country is reeling under acute agrarian distress with over 300,000 [1] farmers committing suicides cumulatively due to debt-burden.

Trump’s stance on Cuba will do untold harm to the Cuban people and only strengthen anti-democratic forces on the island.

We live in a north London street which, despite its impressive 19th century architecture, is peopled mainly by “council tenants” (public housing residents). This is largely due to the left-of-center politics of the local council (government), which bought up large areas of such housing in the 1970s, limiting “development” and gentrification, and preserving much of the working class population. Perhaps as a result Labour MP Emily Thornberry, a strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, was re-elected with an increased majority of over 20,000 votes—63% against the Conservative’s 21%. Nationally, Labour won 30 new seats and increased its vote by 3.5 million and the Conservatives lost their majority.

In mid-June 2017 the Spanish government, led by the right wing Popular Party (PP), supported by the centre right Ciudadanos party, survived a vote of censure brought against it by the anti-austerity Podemos party in the context of growing corruption scandals. The opposition Socialists (PSOE) abstained on the vote.

On 1 July thousands of anti-austerity activists, Labour Party members and trade unionists marched through the streets of London on a demonstration called by the People’s Assembly. It was not the million protestors called for by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell but it was an impressive show for an action called in three action-packed weeks Corbyn and McDonnell do not see a separation between what they argue for in parliament and what activists fight for in workplaces, communities and the streets. They feed each other.

On June 4, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt (followed a few hours later by Bahrain, Yemen, the Maldives, Mauritania and the Libyan dissident government) broke off relations with the Emirate of Qatar for its links with "terrorist organizations and denominational groups seeking to destabilize the region, including the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic State, and al-Qaeda", not to mention the maintenance of relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite differences. The crisis came a week after intense controversy over remarks attributed to the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, where he criticized Riyadh’s determination to isolate Iran diplomatically while taking up the defence of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, both viewed as terrorist groups by Riyadh. Doha was moreover excluded from the Arab military coalition led by Riyadh against the alliance of the Houthists, backed by Iran and the former dictator Ali Abdallah Saleh, while the Qatari media, such as al-Jazeera, have been banned in the majority of countries that have broken off relations with Qatar.

Donald Trump’s speech to the regional potentates and dictators assembled for the occasion in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia was generally acclaimed as eminently presidential, and rightly so. That is to say, it was firmly in the tradition of U.S. presidential addresses on Middle East policy: utterly cynical, dripping with deceit, and above all, irreversibly tied to the United States’ leading role as the chief arms merchant to some of the world’s most brutal regimes.

If one thing is clear from the “Uluru Statement From the Heart” issued after a large Indigenous conference in late May, it is that mere symbolic constitutional recognition of their existence will not satisfy Indigenous people.
The Uluru Statement reflects, in some measure, their desire for real structural change to address the effects of racism and dispossession, for a treaty and for a real say in what happens to them.

The new Catalan party, Catalunya en Comú, faces challenges all new political organizations must overcome.

Robin Lee interviews Au Loong-Yu, a long term activist, writer and member of the Pioneer, a Hong Kong socialist organisation, about the political situation in Hong Kong twenty years after Hong Kong’s reunification with China.