Up and down the country university workers are holding meetings and rallies to reject the proposed deal proposed between the UCU and university employers. Dozens of branches have already voted to reject the deal before a meeting of the union’s Higher Education Committee this afternoon. The proposed deal agreed between the UCU and UUK is […]

Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of Sri Lanka The declaration of a State of Emergency by the government of Ranil Wickremasinghe and Maithripala Sirisena is further evidence, if more were required, that theirs is a government that cannot resolve Sri Lanka’s long standing economic and social problems. The immediate justification for the State of […]

A decade of austerity has undermined many of the economic, social and political gains achieved by women since the 1970s. Job losses, cuts to welfare and social care, and the rise in part time and precarious work, are just some of the factors intensifying the problems faced by women who have to work harder for […]

Sylvia Pankhurst (1882 –1960) was a formidable figure; an internationalist and anti-imperialist, an anti racist, and for a period a revolutionary communist. But it is as a tireless fighter for the emancipation of women that she is best remembered. At the centre of this work, she dedicated herself to the self-organisation and activity of working […]

By Mekdela Ejigu THE limited legal abortion and women’s reproductive rights available in the United States exist in a permanent state of siege enforced by the Republican party and religious conservatives across the country. During President Obama’s terms, Republican House and Senate members repeatedly attempted to block abortion clinics from operating in their districts with […]

COMPLAINTS of sexual harassment and discrimination by women officers and activists often go unresolved in the unions and the Labour Party. This is a shameful record and one that must be corrected immediately. The campaign group LabourToo, has submitted a dossier of complaints about such behaviour in the Labour Party. It consists of 43 anonymised […]

By a London teacher The recent decision by an East London primary school to ban pupils from wearing the hijab shows how Islamophobia subjects Muslim women to a double dose of racism and sexism. Although protests forced the school to reverse the ban, this is not an isolated attempt to single out Muslims for discrimination […]

By Ella Mertens WHETHER in Chile or Ireland, Germany or Poland – all over the world – women are protesting for their right to control their own bodies. A new generation is standing up to say that we can decide for ourselves whether or not to have a child in the event of pregnancy. Poland […]

By Jaqueline Singh WHILE within Fortress Europe right wing agitation and violence against refugees are on the increase, its external borders are increasingly impenetrable. People who flee from hunger, war, violence and exploitation are drowned in the Mediterranean or herded into massive camps on the borders of Greece or Turkey. War zones such as Afghanistan […]

By Hemamali Wijesinghe  Sri Lanka has had a developed culture and literacy for many centuries. As far back as 1931, when it was still a part of the British Raj, the right to vote was won by a campaign that mobilised women as well as men. In 1933, when the British government launched the Poppy […]

MINNIE Lansbury was born in 1889 in Stepney in the East End of London. Her parents, Annie and Isaac Glassman, were Jewish refugees from Poland, who had escaped the pogroms fomented by the Russian Tsarist police. Her tragically short life amongst the slums of the area where she was born was filled with struggle alongside […]

By Frederik Haber THE results of the metal-workers’ pay campaign in Germany have attracted a lot of attention not only at home but internationally. The workers’ union, IG Metall, is widely recognised as the strongest trade-union in the industrial sector globally. It is almost certainly the wealthiest and it is centrally involved in the actual […]

By a Unison schools convenor There are 1.3 million local government and school support workers – 78 per cent of them women. We are the housing officers, youth workers, social workers, teaching assistants, caterers and cleaners that keep hard-up families together and services running. Austerity budgets, year after year, have wiped out over 700,000 jobs […]

By Micaela Edelson The colonization of Indigenous women has persisted even in the ‘post-colonial’ era. Specifically, colonialism promoted a shift from an egalitarian society to a patriarchal societal structure which resulted in a legacy of violence against Indigenous women, and specific colonial sterilization policies not only affected women’s role in Indigenous society, it severely limited […]

By a CWU rep After three months of negotiations, CWU leaders are recommending members vote to accept the deal, claiming it ticks all the boxes in the union’s ‘Four Pillars’ campaign – pensions, legal protections, 35 hour working week, and shift and workload changes. The sweetener is a pay rise touted as 12 per cent […]

ON 6 FEBRUARY 1918, the Representation of the People Act extended the franchise to some women over 30 and all men over 21, so that for the first time in the history of Britain’s ‘centuries old democracy’, a majority of the adult population had the right to vote. Yet millions of the women who had […]

THE SYRIAN Observatory for Human Rights reports that Bashar al-Assad’s warplanes, artillery and barrel bombing helicopters have launched a major assault on the last extensive rebel-held region of Idlib, aided by their Russian allies. It is likely that the offensive aims to concentrate the population into a narrow pocket, subject them to final liquidation or […]

THE HOUSING crisis is reaching new heights after Persimmon Homes bosses share £600 million in bonuses. Young people are struggling to find the money to get on the housing ladder while the chairman of this company gets a yearly bonus of £100 million. While this is going on there are 1000’s of people sleeping on […]

MEMBERS OF the University College Union (UCU) have smashed through the government’s strike ballot threshold to declare their support for industrial action over devastating cuts to their pension scheme. Eighty-eight per cent voted to strike after the government announced cuts that would cost the average lecturer £200,000 in retirement. Strikes After the result, announced on […]

AS FIGURES showed rough sleeping in England increased for the seventh consecutive year, Jeremy Corbyn promised a Labour government would immediately buy 8,000 homes to tackle the crisis. Official government data shows that on any given night in autumn last year, 4,751 people were recorded sleeping on the streets, a figure that has more than doubled since […]

IT GIANT Fujitsu are the latest company to step up their union-busting campaigns, which have been on the increase – with Grangemouth and Picturehouse disputes just two high-profile examples that saw trade union reps victimised for organising workers. On 12 January Fujitsu Manchester sacked Ian Allinson, chair of Unite At Fujitsu, recent left candidate in […]

JEREMY CORBYN has said that there is no convincing solution to the housing crisis that “does not start with a new, very large, very active council house building project”. The Tories’ Housing and Planning Bill claims to be a way to help people without homes to find them, and for those living in sub-standard housing […]

THE COLLAPSE of Carillion and the recent National Auditing Office report have put Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) under the microscope once again. The popularity of such schemes has dwindled in recent years but since the contracts tend to last 25-30 years they still cost the tax-payer £10bn a year with roughly £200bn still to pay. […]

SOME SOUTHWARK Labour councillors have been halted – if only temporarily – in their quest to turn Elephant & Castle’s dilapidated but community-oriented shopping centre into a mecca for the middle classes. A property developer Delancey bought the site and has applied to re-build it with no adequate plans to relocate existing small traders and […]

ERICA GARNER, the Black Lives Matter activist and Bernie Sanders campaigner, has died after a heart attack, aged just 27. Erica was thrust into political activism when white New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo killed her father Eric Garner in an asphyxiating chokehold in 2014, months after the murder of Michael Brown provoked US-wide protests. […]

WITH COUNCIL elections looming in London, the Tory press is full of increasingly worried articles about a Labour landslide. Pollsters are predicting a big increase in Labour votes, Labour councillors and even the possible capture of Tory strongholds like Wandsworth (Thatcher’s favourite council in the 1980s) and Barnet. As Sadiq Khan recently said at the […]

OPRAH WINFREY’S Golden Globes speech aroused many hearts and moved audiences at the 2018 Golden Globes Awards. While accepting the Cecil B DeMille award, Oprah, who became the first Black woman to win the award, praised her mother’s example as a hardworking maid and the women behind the #MeToo movement, declaring that “a new day […]

IN A dramatic about turn, Newham’s directly elected Mayor, Sir Robin Wales, has called for an “open selection” ballot to choose the Labour Party candidate in May’s election. This comes more than a year after party members challenged the result of a “trigger ballot” which confirmed Wales, Mayor since 2002, as the candidate. In that […]

HUNDREDS OF thousands took to the streets in cities across the US on January 20 and 21 to mark the anniversary of the huge protests against the inauguration of Donald Trump and the threat he poses to women’s rights. This year authorities estimated that well over 100,000 people attended the New York rally and that […]

ACCORDING TO police records, knife crime has risen by 21 per cent in the past year, and gun-related offences by 20 per cent. There were over 37,000 arrests for knife offences and over 6,000 for gun crimes. All recorded crimes were up 14 per cent. For the communities, families and individuals caught up in these […]