THE OVERWHELMING priority of the Labour Movement today is to prevent Britain taking military action in Syria, or joining a Trump – led escalation of conflict with Russia. We can do that without pretending that Assad is anything other than a fascistic monster at war with his own people. We can do that without pretending […]

ROBIN WALES, the long-standing, perhaps long-reigning would be more accurate, directly elected Mayor of Newham, has finally been deselected as the Labour Party’s candidate in the forthcoming mayoral election. In an Open Selection ballot of the membership, held after Wales was not adopted as the candidate in a second Trigger Ballot, he was roundly defeated, […]

ON 4 MARCH 2018, a former Russian spy turned double agent for MI5, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, were poisoned using Novichok, a hitherto obscure nerve agent. The British government has named Russia and its newly re-elected President, Vladimir Putin, as the culprit. The main evidence is the claimed development of Novichok by Russia, […]

By KD Tait THERE WERE a lot of Labour people on Saturday’s demo for the 15 Gazans murdered in cold blood by Israel – but there was not one Labour MP among them. Why? The protest was so supportable, called by Palestine solidarity campaigns to protest the murder of 31 civilians by Israeli occupation forces […]

By Jeremy Dewar, Unison rep, pc Another year, another pay cut. Or so it seems. As we go to press, Britain’s biggest local government union, Unison, is about to close its second consultative ballot (we didn’t give the right answer first time) on the employers’ 2018-19 pay offer. The offer is atrocious: a real pay […]

Israeli armed forces, firing indiscriminately on unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, men, women and children, have killed at least 16 and injured well over one hundred. As is usual in such cases, the US and British representatives on the UN Security Council have blocked any condemnation of Israel, or even any call on it to stop the […]

THE SUDDEN coordinated onslaught against Jeremy Corbyn over the weekend of 24-25 March was a transparent attempt by an alliance of rightwing forces to damage Labour’s strong lead in the run up to the May council elections, and to destabilise Corbyn’s ever-more consolidated leadership of the Labour Party. Things have not been going well for […]

Statement of the Liga Socialista to the Brazil Social Forum SINCE the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT) we are essentially in a coup situation. Today it is also clear that it is not only a constitutional overthrow by Congress. There is a consistent front extending from the powerful entrepreneurial association […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

THE CLEAN sweep of Momentum candidates for three new seats created to represent Labour’s expanded membership on its nec is a chance for the left to press for long overdue democratic reform of the party. Yasmine Dar, Rachel Garnham and Jon Lansman’s landslide victory confirms the demoralisation and decline of the right’s base amongst the […]

LABOUR’S DEMOCRACY review, led by Katy Clark, is an important opportunity for members to demand the opening up of the party to greater, meaningful participation from below. We list here some of our recommendations for the review. We have included the call for mandatory re-selection of MPs, even though the review does not explicitly refer […]