Birmingham City Council has announced that £300 million will be cut from the budget over the next four years. This will involve the loss of 7,116 full time jobs, that is 37 per cent of the workforce, reports Bernie McAdam. The losses will increase to 10,000 when part time jobs are included. The Con Dem […]
A campaign of repression against the growing resistance to the cuts exposes collusion between the different arms of the state – the police, courts, intelligence agencies – even drawing in the supposedly independent media. With the aid of the right-wing papers, the police are trying to demonise students that took to the streets in the […]
Egypt is aflame with revolution. The world has watched with bated breath as millions of Egyptians have shown that they will not be intimidated and coerced any longer. A general strike has been proclaimed and on 1 February two million demonstrators packed the vast Tahrir (Liberation) Square in Cairo demanding Hosni Mubarak’s departure. His dictatorial […]
The League for the Fifth International, of which Workers Power is the British section, held a successful congress in Sri Lanka in January. Members from Germany, Austria, and Britain met with delegates from the Pakistan and Sri Lankan sections of the League to discuss the issues facing the international working class. This congress was the […]
Consistent opponents of Israel’s occupation have long argued that the “moderate” Palestinian leaders of Fatah are in reality collaborators with Israel. Nothing could have confirmed this more conclusively than the release by news agency Al Jazeera of documents exposing 10 years of futile “peace” negotiations. The picture that emerges is of weak and grovelling Palestinian […]
David Kato was bludgeoned to death in his home with a hammer on 26 January. David was a gay rights activist in Uganda, leading the Sexual Minorities Uganda (Smug) campaigning organisation. David knew he was a target in a country renown for its anti-gay laws. It is already an offence, punishable by 14 years in […]
The flight of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on 14 January came as culmination of a month of street mobilisations, starting with young unemployed youth in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, spreading nationwide, drawing in industrial workers, teachers and lawyers. Demonstrations in Tunis calling for Ben Ali to go climaxed into […]
Across the country, local councillors are voting on job cuts and the destruction of much needed services. At the same time, hundreds, sometimes thousands demonstrate outside, trying to block or slow down proceedings in the council chambers. Both sides know this could mark the beginning of a mass movement against the cuts. The job losses […]
The Conservative whitepaper, “Equity and Excellence: liberating the NHS”, is designed to transfer control for £80 billion pounds of the NHS budget to the private health sector. It means the end of the NHS as a publicly owned and operated service, and its transformation into little more than a brand name, which health corporations will […]
In the first two years of the Global Financial Crisis, everyone seemed to know where the blame lay – with the huge banks that pushed the international system of borrowing and lending into chaos. Yet slowly but surely the politicians regrouped and shifted the debate away from criticism of the bankers, blaming the crisis on […]
Teachers, civil servants and lecturers are set to lose tens of thousands of pounds from their pensions over a lifetime because the government wants to peg them to the retail price index, which does not take account of the real rise in living costs, in particular housing costs. On top of this, teachers will typically […]
The Communication Workers Union has taken to the streets to protest against plans to privatise Royal Mail. The Coalition has broken yet another promise: that private capital would only take a minority stake in Royal Mail. Now we face a full-blown sell-off. Promises to safeguard post offices and the Universal Service Obligation (to deliver equally […]
What is a revolutionary situation “… a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? […] (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is […]
The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have inspired millions of people around the world. In Tunisia mass demonstrations routed the police of dictator Ben Ali – then a general strike drove him out of the country. Dragged into a spiral of mass unemployment, of price rises and poverty, the poor, the youth and the workers […]
The November-December demonstrations by school and university students blew away the stifling atmosphere that had built up within the Labour movement like a cold but bracing wind. So when young people stormed the Tory HQ and then carried on mobilising for over a month despite hysterical witch hunting by the media and violent police repression […]
David Cameron announced it was full steam ahead with the government spending cuts after it was announced that the economy had worsened. Why? Because the government aims to slash wages and services irrespective of the economics damage, writes Keith Spencer The UK economy contracted by 0.5 per cent in the last quarter of 2010, it […]
The council room of Camden Town Hall was packed out on the evening of Monday 10 January for the launch meeting of Camden United Against the Cuts. Camden’s financial crisis is one of the worst in London and the sheer scale of the cuts is historic. With £80 to £100 million to be lost from […]
Pakistan’s finance minister, Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, has an international reputation as a privatiser, writes Shehzad Arshad of the RSL. He has headed World Bank and International Monetary Fund teams charged with forcing the sell-off of telecoms, electricity supply, transport, aviation, banking and manufacturing in some 18 countries, including Argentina.
Sudan’s Southern region is set to hold a referendum on 9 January, widely expected to result in a majority for independence from the predominantly Arab and Muslim North. The vote comes after a bitter war lasting for decades, in which the North attempted to hold on to the South. It comes down to control of […]
The USA, its intelligence services and right-wing media such as Fox and Sky are waging a brutal world wide campaign against Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange – they are determined to destroy this site and crush the people behind it because it dares to reveal their crimes and refuses to bow the knee to […]
World leaders failed the planet yet again in Cancún, Mexico when the Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP16) could not reach a legally binding agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol – which runs out in 2012. Less than half as many delegates and observers attended, compared to the 45,000 at the previous COP15 […]
In the summer of 1994, when I was visiting my Iraqi cousins in Baghdad, I told them the story of the accidental death by hanging of Stephen Milligan MP in an auto-erotic incident involving self-strangulation and drugs. Their immediate response was to ask in disbelief: “Why did they kill him like that?” From then on, […]
Eleven months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January 2010, the country is now suffering from an outbreak of cholera. This deadly water-borne disease, which thrives in the unsanitary conditions in which many earthquake survivors still live, has killed around 2,000 people and more than 96,000 are infected. Haiti, which has not seen a […]
The pure horror of the Sri Lankan government’s genocidal war against the Tamils in May 2009 has been released in new photo and video evidence, which contradicts the Sri Lankan government’s lies. The photo and video footage show piles of dead bodies, many of them naked, with their hands bound behind their backs, and shot […]
The Government’s Green Paper on legal aid proposes a set of changes that will destroy this vital public service. The paper proposes that advice and representation will no longer be available to all under civil legal aid. This includes most family and many housing cases, immigration, clinical negligence and education law. There are three main […]
The European debt crisis is expanding, pitching country against country, with the major economies attempting to push recession onto the working class of economically weaker nations. With the system itself in crisis, governments aim to shift their debt burden by attacking jobs, pay and services at home, and dumping the worst of the crisis onto […]
Unions are gearing up to defend public sector pensions in what could be a key battle with the Con-Dems in 2011. The government has condemned the “gold plated” final salary pensions of public sector workers. Several unions are already planning to strike in defence of pensions. Mark Serwotka leader of the Civil servants union PCS […]
The sheer breadth and depth of the cuts has angered hundreds of thousands. Activists across the country have responded with local anti-cuts alliances, organising demos, lobbies and sit-ins, targeting universities, councils and tax-dodgers. The student rebellion catapulted this resistance onto the national stage. The successful Coalition of Resistance (CoR) conference on 27 November could not […]
Well! In Unite’s leadership election, left-wing candidate Len McCluskey won with over 100,000 votes. Over 50,000 members voted for second-placed Jerry Hicks, who campaigned on a rank and file ticket. As readers will know, I supported Hicks. Just days after his election, McCluskey told the Coalition of Resistance (CoR) conference that we need “people power” […]
The youth movement REVOLUTION has played a leading role in the student protests by organising young people across the country to fight the Tory-Lib Dem cuts. Members have helped to organise university occupations at University Collage London (UCL), London South Bank University (LSBU), and Leeds University. We have also taken part in sixth-form sit-ins at […]