Polish Solidarity Campaign
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Polish Solidarity Campaign
Britain's Polish Solidarity Campaign (PSC) was a UK-based campaign in solidarity with Solidarity (the Solidarność trade union) and other democratic forces in Poland. It was founded in August 1980 by Robin Blick, Karen Blick, and Adam Westoby, and continued its activities into the first half of the 1990s. The campaign was not named after Polish Solidarity (of whose name the founders became aware only later on); rather, it was inspired by the Chile Solidarity Campaign and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. Founding and early membership Founded in 1980, most of the PSC's early members were ex-Communists, trade unionists and Labour Party supporters as well as left wing Polish exiles, including members of the Polish Socialist Party In Exile, and the main campaign centred on gaining support for Solidarnosc from British trade union movement. Founding members were Robin Blick, Karen Blick, and Adam Westoby. Within the first year, PSC had become a mainstream movement of support for Sol ...
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Solidarność
Solidarity ( pl, „Solidarność”, ), full name Independent Self-Governing Trade Union "Solidarity" (, abbreviated ''NSZZ „Solidarność”'' ), is a Polish trade union founded in August 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland. Subsequently, it was the first independent trade union in a Warsaw Pact country to be recognised by the state. The union's membership peaked at 10 million in September 1981, representing one-third of the country's working-age population. Solidarity's leader Lech Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and the union is widely recognised as having played a central role in the end of Communist rule in Poland. In the 1980s, Solidarity was a broad anti-authoritarian social movement, using methods of civil resistance to advance the causes of workers' rights and social change. Government attempts in the early 1980s to destroy the union through the imposition of martial law in Poland and the use of political repression failed. Operati ...
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Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous member state of the European Union. Warsaw is the nation's capital and largest metropolis. Other major cities include Kraków, Wrocław, Łódź, Poznań, Gdańsk, and Szczecin. Poland has a temperate transitional climate and its territory traverses the Central European Plain, extending from Baltic Sea in the north to Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains in the south. The longest Polish river is the Vistula, and Poland's highest point is Mount Rysy, situated in the Tatra mountain range of the Carpathians. The country is bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukraine to the east, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the south, and Germany to the west. It also shares maritime boundaries with Denmark and Sweden. ...
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Chile Solidarity Campaign
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Chile covers an area of , with a population of 17.5 million as of 2017. It shares land borders with Peru to the north, Bolivia to the north-east, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far south. Chile also controls the Pacific islands of Juan Fernández, Isla Salas y Gómez, Desventuradas, and Easter Island in Oceania. It also claims about of Antarctica under the Chilean Antarctic Territory. The country's capital and largest city is Santiago, and its national language is Spanish. Spain conquered and colonized the region in the mid-16th century, replacing Inca rule, but failing to conquer the independent Mapuche who inhabited what is now south-central Chile. In 1818, after declaring in ...
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Vietnam Solidarity Campaign
The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) was originally set up in 1966 by activists around the International Group with the personal and financial support of Bertrand Russell. Ralph Schoenman acted both as Director of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and as Executive Director of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. Marxist activists including Tariq Ali, Ernie Tate, Al Richardson, David Horowitz, John La Rose and Pat Jordan also played a key role. Members of the International Socialists participated in the foundation of the VSC, but for the first year of its existence its presence was a token one only. It organised a demonstration of 20,000 people in October 1967 that for the first time ignored police warnings not to enter Grosvenor Square, where the United States Embassy in London was then located. In March and October 1968 two major demonstrations in London, sponsored by the VSC, drew more than 100,000 participants. Serious police violence was captured by press and television c ...
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Polish Socialist Party
The Polish Socialist Party ( pl, Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS) is a socialist political party in Poland. It was one of the most important parties in Poland from its inception in 1892 until its merger with the communist Polish Workers' Party to form the Polish United Workers' Party in 1948. Józef Piłsudski, founder of the Second Polish Republic, belonged to and later led the PPS in the early 20th century. The party was re-established in 1987, near the end of the Polish People's Republic. However, it remained in the margins of Polish politics until 2019, when it was able to win a seat in the Senate of Poland. History The PPS was founded in Paris in 1892 (see the Great Emigration). In 1893 the party called Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, (SDKPiL), emerged from the PPS, with the PPS being more nationalist and oriented towards Polish independence, and the SDKPiL being more revolutionary and communist. In November 1892 the leading personalities of t ...
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International Marxist Group
:''See also the International Marxist Group (Germany). The International Marxist Group (IMG) was a Trotskyist group in Britain between 1968 and 1982. It was the British Section of the Fourth International. It had around 1,000 members and supporters in the late 1970s. In 1980, it had 682 members; by 1982, when it changed its name to the Socialist League, membership had fallen to 534. Origins The IMG emerged from the International Group, a sympathising organisation of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (IS). Its founders, Pat Jordan and Ken Coates, had broken with the CPGB in Nottingham in 1956. They were members of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) in the late 1950s (which was later renamed Militant), Jordan becoming organising secretary. In 1961, they split to form the Internationalist Group in support of the IS against the leadership of the RSL, its British section. In 1963, the ISFI reunited with the majority of the International Committee of ...
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Labour Party Conference
The Labour Party Conference is the annual conference of the British Labour Party. It is formally the supreme decision-making body of the party and is traditionally held in the final week of September, during the party conference season when the House of Commons is in recess, after each year's second Liberal Democrat Conference and before the Conservative Party Conference. The Labour Party Conference opens on a Sunday and finishes the following Wednesday, with an address by the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party; the Leader's address is usually on the Tuesday. In contrast to the Liberal Democrat Conference, where every party member attending its Conference, in person or Online, has the right to vote on party policy, under a one member, one vote system, or the Conservative Party Conference, which does not hold votes on party policy, at the Labour Party Conference, 50% of votes are allocated to affiliated organisations (such as trade unions), and the other 50% to Constituency Labo ...
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National Executive Committee Of The Labour Party
The National Executive Committee (NEC) is the governing body of the UK Labour Party, setting the overall strategic direction of the party and policy development. Its composition has changed over the years, and includes representatives of affiliated trade unions, the Parliamentary Labour Party, constituency Labour parties (CLP), and socialist societies, as well as ''ex officio'' members such as the party Leader and Deputy Leader and several of their appointees. History During the 1980s, the NEC had a major role in policy-making and was often at the heart of disputes over party policy. In 1997, under Tony Blair's new party leadership, the General Secretary Tom Sawyer enacted the Partnership in Power reforms. This rebalanced the NEC's membership, including by reducing trade union membership to a minority for the first time in its history. The reforms also introduced new seats: two for local government, three for the Parliamentary Party, three for the (Shadow) Cabinet, and one fo ...
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Greater London Council
The Greater London Council (GLC) was the top-tier local government administrative body for Greater London from 1965 to 1986. It replaced the earlier London County Council (LCC) which had covered a much smaller area. The GLC was dissolved in 1986 by the Local Government Act 1985 and its powers were devolved to the London boroughs and other entities. A new administrative body, known as the Greater London Authority (GLA), was established in 2000. Creation The GLC was established by the London Government Act 1963, which sought to create a new body covering more of London rather than just the inner part of the conurbation, additionally including and empowering newly created London boroughs within the overall administrative structure. In 1957 a Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London had been set up under Edwin Herbert, Baron Tangley, Sir Edwin Herbert, and this reported in 1960, recommending the creation of 52 new London boroughs as the basis for local government. It ...
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Giles Hart
Giles Vernon Hart (20 November 1949 – 7 July 2005) was a British Telecom engineer working for BT Operate and a trade unionist. Early life Hart was born in Khartoum, Sudan, when his father was head of English at Gordon College. He moved to England with his family when he was five years old, and attended Woodhouse Grammar School, now Woodhouse College, and read Mathematics at Royal Holloway College. Political campaigning While working as an executive officer at Trinity House lighthouse authority, he set up a union branch. In the 1980s, he was chairman, secretary and treasurer of the ''Polish Solidarity Campaign'', the main British pro-Solidarność organisation, and edited a history ''For Our Freedom and Yours (1995)''. He was a prominent member of the British Humanist Association and chair of Havering Humanists, also chair of the H.G. Wells Society at the time of his untimely death. Death He died in the 7 July 2005 London bombings, when he was killed instantly when travelling ...
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