Hands off Belarus!

THE GREEDY EYES of Anglo-American and Franco-German imperialism are now focused on Belarus. They’re dying to get their hands on the former Soviet republic to use its land as another NATO front against the Russian Federation and to strip it bare of its natural resources. Their willing tools call themselves as “freedom fighters” and “democrats”, whilst others pose as “socialists” and “revolutionaries” for the “human rights” gang and the phony Trots inside and outside the Labour Party.
     In reality they despise the working people of Belarus, who still enjoy many of the benefits won in the old days through Soviet power. Their bogus “National Strike Committee”, which is calling for a general strike to bring down the Lukashenko government, doesn’t have any industrial workers on its board and it only calls for strikes in the state-owned enterprises. They picket major plants with supporters drawn from their petty-bourgeois ranks. They try, but so far have failed, to win workers over with their usual lies of the “paradise” that supposedly exists over the border in the European Union. Needless to say, they never call for industrial action against private or foreign-owned enterprises.
     The Belarusian communists and their supporters have been holding mass rallies of their own in support of the Lukashenko government. At the same time, they are backing rank-and-file People’s Committees who are calling on workers to strike for higher pay in the private and foreign-owned enterprises and demand their nationalisation.
     The opposition wants to cosy up to the EU and US-led imperialism, cut the health service, privatise the very large public sector and end the alliance with Russia. We saw what happened when this agenda was implemented in Ukraine after the legitimate government was overthrown by fascist gangs in 2014. Belarusian communists are determined to ensure that it doesn’t happen again in their own country. We have a duty to counter the lies of the bourgeois media and those of their stooges within the labour movement who pose as socialists. All over the world communists are rallying to defend Belarusian independence. We must join them now! 

 Twist and Shout

BORIS JOHNSON did another U-turn last weekend, reversing his government’s defence of the ludicrous mathematical formula – the Ofqual algorithm – to assess A-level grades in the absence of exams due to closure of schools during the coronavirus lock-down. Last week the Tories defended the exam regulator’s “robust” algorithm that disproportionately affected those in more deprived state schools and slashed the grades of hundreds of thousands of students in England.
     Teaching unions protested. Students took to the streets in noisy protests. Labour leader Keir Starmer denounced the Government’s “unprecedented and chaotic” handling of the situation, while the regional governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland refused to implement the changes. Johnson can live with that. What did bother him was the anger of thousands of Tory parents angered at the way that their children’s university application had been jeopardised by the jobsworths at the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual), who may originally have thought that their scheme would only penalise working-class students. No-one can blame Johnson for changing his mind.     The Prime Minister’s decision to allow teachers’ assessments to be used instead of the downgraded results shows that the Prime Minister does heed protests – not least when they come from his own Tory heartlands. While Boris clearly has no firm opinion on any major matters of state, he could save himself a lot of grief if he stopped listening to the likes of Dominic Cummings and carried out proper consultations with the professional bodies, administrators, and teaching and student unions in the arena of education.