After a heavily contested first round, the Egyptian presidential election came down to a run-off between two candidates, representing two wings of the same ruling class. As we go to press the results are not known. The candidate of the undisguised counter-revolution is Ahmed Shafiq, puppet of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), […]
Delegates to this year’s PCS conference were clearly in favour of further strike action in defence of pensions, pay and jobs and against the European austerity agenda, but the motions passed were careful not to commit the leadership to any specific action. Delegate Rebecca Allan reports The conference kicked off with a debate over the […]
THE COALITION took a drubbing in the local elections. The Tories and Lib Dems lost 741 seats and 13 councils, including major cities like Southampton, where a year long strike campaign by local authority workers has finally seen their wage-cutting Tory bosses defeated at the polls.
As we go to press, news is breaking of victories for the left in France and Greece. François Hollande, first Socialist Party president for a generation, told his cheering supporters, “Austerity is no longer an option,” and pledged himself to seek policies from the European Union for “growth, jobs and prosperity… a new start for […]
The recent police killings of Mark Duggan and Anthony Grainger expose the racism rife in the police force. Conditioned to see young, black men as drug dealers and gangsters, in both cases the police shot dead an unarmed man.
The #justice4grainger campaign is growing – and it will not stop until it gets justice. It now counts more than 6,000 members and is forging solidarity links with many other police justice campaigns. The campaign was launched after Greater Manchester police shot dead Anthony Grainger on 3 March 2012. His death at the hands of […]
Joy Macready takes stock of the results ot the local council elections and asks where now for Labour? Thursday 3 May proved to be a red-letter day for Labour. The local elections saw a mass turn to Labour, despite its lack of strategy to oppose austerity. This was clearly a protest vote against the […]
Britain is experiencing “the deepest recession and weakest recovery for 100 years,” according to Michael Saunders, an economist at Citigroup. Output has not recovered even half of what it lost in the great crash of 2008-09 and the economy has flatlined over the past year, and has started to contract again with a 0.2 per […]
The Eurozone crisis is the main immediate threat to world economic stability and could spark another worldwide recession. Now the 6 May elections have added a new political dimension, with the victory of the Socialist Party’s Francois Hollande in France and his calls for a new growth pact. Andy Yorke explains why this is no […]
THE CAPITALISTS’ LUST for oil and gas knows no boundaries. From wars to extortion, economic sanctions and environmental disasters, these are all just unfortunate blips in the profit figures for those who control the globe’s ever-dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. In recent years rising oil prices, in part due to the instability caused by imperialist war […]
VETERAN IRISH Republican Marian Price has been imprisoned without trial since May 2011. This harks back to the British government’s widespread use of internment in the 1970’s as a way of silencing opposition to its rule in the north of Ireland. This repressive policy only succeeded in broadening the scale of the anti-Unionist and anti-British […]
By Marcus Halaby THE HEADY combination of big business, land development, local and national politics, and the struggle for international prestige has always ensured that major sporting events like the Olympics are fraught with issues for the communities that live and work near them. Few people, however, could have expected the news that ground-based […]
By Sally Turner REMPLOY, a government-owned company that provides disabled people with employment, is closing 36 of its 54 factories and sacking at least 1,700 workers. Everyone should oppose this act, which will destroy workers’ dignity and independence, as well as halting socially useful production. Workers Power and Revolution members went to meet the […]
By Rebecca Anderson The issue of overriding importance at this year’s conference of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union will again be the battle to save our pensions. The government has now implemented the changes to our pensions – we will work longer, pay more and get less – but this does mean […]
BUS DRIVERS in the capital are to ballot for strike action in pursuit of a £500 Olympic bonus to compensate for the 800,000 extra passengers expected during the summer Games. The mental stress and physical strain (the extra work of the engine in a jam-packed bus jars the drivers’ back) of working extra hours in this […]
By Sally Turner As soldiers prepare to scab on tanker drivers, it is clear that the threat of a national strike remains very real. Despite ongoing negotiations and a final proposal from the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) to prevent a strike, it seems unlikely that drivers will accept it. Last month, workers […]
The fight to save the NHS starts with the pensions strike on 10 May, argues NHS worker Dara O’Connell A HUNDRED thousand health workers in Unite will take strike action on Thursday 10 May over attacks to their pensions. Members of the PCS, UCU, Nipsa and the RMT will join them, as strikes hit […]
By Bernie McAdam, Sandwell NUT The National Union of Teachers (NUT) Conference this Easter made abundantly clear to its leaders that more national strike action was needed to stop the Coalition’s pensions attack. A successful motion called for regional strikes in the summer term, culminating in a national strike in June. Within weeks, however, the […]
WE ARE IN the midst of the biggest capitalist offensive for generations and yet the response from the trade union leaders has been miniscule. There is a yawning chasm between the scale of action needed to stop the cuts and bring down the government, and the timid industrial action strategies put forward by union leaders, […]
PAKISTAN’S MILITARY has intensified its fifth operation in Balochistan, battling a resistance movement against national oppression. Thousands of Balochi political activists are missing, and four hundred bodies of students, engineers, doctors and workers have been found, many showing evidence of severe torture. Arshad Shazhad reports. Rebel leader Nawab Akbar Bugti’s assassination in August 2006, and […]
Students in Québec, Canada have been on strike for three months against the government’s attempts to raise university tuition fees, while Chilean students are protesting for reforms in the public education system, writes KD Tait THE GENERAL unlimited strike, organised by a coalition of student federations, started on February 13 and has drawn in […]
The Arab Spring of 2011 inspired millions around the world through its acts of heroism. But now the revolutions have stalled. In the spirit of solidarity with these movements and communist internationalism, Marcus Halaby takes a critical look at the far left in these countries and Syria in particular One of the most noticeable […]
The Greek elections have demonstrated a massive popular rejection of the governing parties who support the EU-IMF austerity memorandum that has caused so much suffering to ordinary Greek people over the last two years. New Democracy (ND), which won 33.5 per cent in 2009, is in first place with 18.9 per cent, a loss of […]
In this timely commemorative article, Dave Stockton looks at the lessons from the great working class struggles before World War One. Part two will follow next month. We have just marked the 100th anniversary of the miners’ strike of February-April 1912. This was the first national strike by a section of workers who in […]
THE VICTORY of Francois Hollande has raised huge expectations among workers across France and Europe of an end to austerity, posing the possibility of major struggles ahead. On a high turnout of 81 per cent, right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy was booted from office, leaving the Elysée Palace to be occupied by a Socialist President for the […]
A project is launched in Britain, bringing together activists from around the UK in a new network for united action and open debate. Will it succeed where others have failed? Or will it fall apart like so many ‘unity initiatives’ in the past? The answer depends on whether the participants can reach agreement on their strategy and […]
The latest crisis in the police goes beyond individual racism, the whole system defends the police from accountability or prosecution. Crown Prosecution Service The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the government agency involved in bringing forward cases for prosecution, works hand in glove with the police. It has a long record of giving police a ‘get […]
Only token changes have been made since the 1999 Macpherson report concluded that the police were “institutionally racist”, after an inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence murder case exposed rampant police corruption and racism. Despite rising discrimination against Black and Asian people critical reports on continued police racism in 2004 and 2009, particularly around the racist […]
In the last week, the London Metropolitan Police have become swamped by a series of exposes of police racism dating back to the London riots. The allegations expose the way the whole justice system protects the police and defends racism. On 30 March the Guardian newspaper released a recording made by Mauro Demetrio, a 21 […]
International Council, League for the Fifth International, 9 April 2012 Our Council has learnt with dismay and anger of the abduction of Kumar Gunarathnam and Dimuthu Attygalle, leading members of the Movement for People’s Struggle, on April 6th. Coming after the abduction of Lalith Kumar Weeraraj and Kugan Murugan from the streets of Jaffna in broad daylight […]