Thick and fast

A week of dramatic news. Kabul - and other Afghan cities - fall to the Northern Alliance forces. A very odd plane crash in New York. The introduction of draconian ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation in the UK.

Who knows what will happen next? Death and mayhem in the streets of central London? A setback for US and UK imperialism in Afghanistan? Whatever the future brings, the role of the Weekly Worker is to provide answers for all the important questions of the day - and sooner rather than later.

To do this requires money. And we are glad to report that your financial contributions are continuing to reach us at a steady and reassuring pace. Given the deficit we accumulated at the beginning of the year, we must exceed our target of £450 for November and December.

So thanks go to comrades RF (£20), DF, HM and DS (£15 each), AL and DM (£10), MM  and PL (£5). This brings our total so far to £220, so we are now within decent striking range of our monthly target. However, there is absolutely no room for complacency. One slow week and we will fall short.

Comrades, make sure this does not happen.

Robbie Rix

Ask for a bankers order form, or send cheques, payable to Weekly Worker, BCM Box 928, London WC1N 3XX

Weekly Worker 408 is available in pdf format as zipped (1.20MB) or unzipped (1.53MB) files

Number 408

Thursday November 15 2001

The Weekly Worker is available from bookshops across the United Kingdom or can be delivered direct to your door by completing our online subscription form.

Fight reaction on all fronts
Communists call for the defeat of Blair and the Taliban. James Marshall explains

Letters
Acceptable fundamentalism; Birmingham abuse; Republican SA?

Internment returns
Jim Gilbert reports on New Labour's latest assault of civil liberties

• Defend democracy
  Dave Nellist, chair of the Socialist Alliance, issued the following statement in response to Blunkett’s latest attack

House of patronage
Eddie Ford looks at reform of the House of Lords

Democracy and the anti-war movement
Tina Becker calls for democracy, openness and politics in the Stop the War Coalition

Taliban apologists
Sarah McDonald reports on the anti-war meeting in Dundee

Afghan pipeline politics
James Mallory reviews Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: islam, oil and the new great game in central Asia

CPGB-AWL cooperation
The CP and the Alliance for Workers' Liberty met to discuss joint work. Marcus Larsen reports

Should we defend the Taliban?
Ian Donovan takes up the arguments of two socialists who believe that it is a duty to defend the Taliban ‘against imperialism’. The first is Bob Pitt, a Labour Party member and editor of What Next? The other is a ‘orthodox’ Trotskyist Liz Hoskins

Simon Harvey of the Socialist abour Party
Divide deepens

Socialist Alliance: Factional rights cannot be denied
The age of sects has passed, writes Jack Conrad. The left needs to grow up

SSP sees off McLeish
Ronnie Mejka reports on events in the Scottish parliament

Unleashing energy
Two leading figures within Artists Against the War, Tam Dean Burn and Emma Schad, talked to the Weekly Worker about the role of their organisation

Our history
Affiliation rejected

War comes home
Alan Simpson is Labour MP for Nottingham South . As a leading member of the Campaign Group of Labour MPs has been a consistent critic of the government’s war on Afghanistan and will address the mass  anti-war demonstration on November 18. He spoke to Mark Fischer