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 […]

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 […]

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

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

NUMSA announces new 'Revolutionary Workers' Party' 

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 […]

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

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