Red Flag issue 17

Housing bosses rake in £100m bonuses

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

UCU Lecturers to strike against 40 per cent pension cut

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

Corbyn promises immediate action to help record numbers of homeless

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

Reinstate Ian Allinson – support the Fujitsu strike

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

More council homes needed to solve housing crisis

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

PFI has been a £200 billion rip-off

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. […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

The Elephant in the Council chamber

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

Obituary: Erica Garner 1990-2017

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. […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

Organise the Left for London council campaigns

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

Oprah for President?

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

Newham Mayor ungraciously concedes members’ democratic rights

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

USA: Hundreds of thousands march against sexism

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

Sadiq Khan revives racist Stop & Search

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

Momentum candidates sweep new NEC places

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

Labour Party Democracy Review – where to begin?

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 […]

Workers Power  ·  01 February 2018

RF No. 17 Editorial: Getting serious about taking power

Labour needs to become a genuine social movement to make an election victory the launchpad for a real struggle for power

Workers Power  ·  30 January 2018

A defeated revolution: Finland 1918

The heroic fight of the Finnish workers tends to be unfairly overlooked when the great revolutionary events of 1917-18 are recounted. Jens-Hugo Nyberg tells the story

Workers Power  ·  27 January 2018

Business as usual in the ANC but fresh forces assemble to its left

NUMSA announces new 'Revolutionary Workers' Party' 

Workers Power  ·  26 January 2018

Austria: 1,500 school students strike against right-wing coalition government

By REVOLUTION – International Communist Youth Organisation ON 13 JANUARY tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Vienna against the new Austrian government, formed by the conservative Austrian Peoples Party (ÖVP) and the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). The  “Black-Blue” coalition, so-called from the parties’ colours, is planning the worst attacks on the working class and […]

Workers Power  ·  25 January 2018

SPD Young Socialists step up opposition to new Grand Coalition in Germany

The final decision will be made by a ballot of the whole membership

Workers Power  ·  24 January 2018

15 years since Stop the War failed to stop the invasion of Iraq

The increase in militarist rhetoric and inter-imperialist tensions makes it a good time to reconsider the lessons of Britain's biggest antiwar movement

Workers Power  ·  23 January 2018

The Wrong Reflections – Black Mirror Series 4 Review

Does Charlie Brooker's latest effort hold a mirror up to the real threat?

Rob Schofield  ·  22 January 2018

Hands off Afrin! Solidarity with the Kurds!

THE INTERNATIONAL workers' movement should take to the streets in solidarity with the justified resistance of the Kurds' against Turkish militarism

Workers Power  ·  22 January 2018

From the ruins of Carillion and PFI, let’s build a real alternative

The collapse of Carillion threatens the whole privatisation and outsourcing swindle, but bolder measures are needed to completely break with the logic of the market. 

Workers Power  ·  16 January 2018

Give class room in Labour’s education policy

JEREMY DEWAR responds to Angela Rayner’s recent comments about white working class boys’ underachievement in school

Workers Power  ·  08 January 2018

Why won’t Labour show solidarity with Iran protests?

The Labour leadership's 'caution' is a cover for ducking its duty of solidarity and giving the Iran regime the benefit of the doubt

Workers Power  ·  08 January 2018

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