By KD Tait DONALD TRUMP’S long anticipated UK visit will take place on 13 July, immediately after a consultation with his alienated Nato allies at a summit in Brussels.  Campaigners are preparing to stage the biggest demonstration since the Iraq war, to give a suitable welcome to a President who threatens to “totally destroy” states […]

By KD Tait KEN LIVINGSTONE has resigned from the Labour Party, days before a formal disciplinary process was due to start, the outcome of which had become a foregone conclusion after “Baroness”  Shami Chakrabarti spoke out in favour of his expulsion, signalling that the leadership had definitively turned against him.  In making those comments, Chakrabarti […]

By Peter Main  THIS MONTH sees the second anniversary of the “Brexit Referendum” and, a few days later, the opening of a crucial EU summit on 28 June. Until now, it has been possible for Theresa May to hold her party together by publicly echoing the rhetoric of the “hard Brexiteers” whilst, in the actual […]

By Jeremy Dewar LOCAL GOVERNMENT officers, health workers and school support staff will gather in Brighton in mid-June ostensibly to discuss and debate the way forward for Unison, the principle public sector union. In reality it will be a frustrating week, listening to endless and highly inappropriate self-congratulation from the top table. Motions or amendments […]

By a PCS activist THE Public and Commercial Services union’s annual conference in May voted by a huge majority to ballot for industrial action over pay. After a two-year freeze and five-year one per cent cap, many members’ pay has only risen 5 per cent in seven years, inflation has stormed ahead at 20 per […]

By Rebecca Anderson DELEGATES TO UCU’s 2018 congress witnessed an unprecedented attack on their democratic rights by the union leadership. Officials repeatedly suspended conference when delegates refused to withdraw motions critical of the union leadership’s behaviour during the recent 14-day pensions strike.  The strike ended with members voting to accept a deal, which puts off […]

By Dave Stockton THE YEAR 1968 was one of history’s “mad years” like 1848, 1917-18, 1989 and, most recently, 2011. It was a time when the eruption of revolts in one country quickly stimulated upheavals in others. The spread of international revolutionary upheavals seemed to offer the prospect of a dramatic thawing of the permafrost […]

By Jeremy Dewar SINCE THE heyday of the National Front in the 1970s, British Nazis have always dreamt of lashing up with the football hooligan scene. If they could inculcate fascist ideas into the heads of the leaders of the various “firms” – often full of racist and socially conservative prejudices already – then, they […]

Andy Yorke reviews Paul Mason, PostCapitalism

By Katie Pelikanou THE SYRIAN regime is undertaking a thinly-veiled legal manoeuvre to punish the millions of refugees who have fled the civil war, and entrench the postwar sectarian redivision of Syria by repossessing their homes. The government of dictator Bashar Al-Assad enacted this law whilst the remnants of the Syrian army, along with Iranian […]

By Dave Stockton AFTER NEARLY three months of negotiations, a coalition government has been formed in Italy between the Five Star Movement (M5S) and the League (formerly Lega Nord). Coverage of the government’s difficult birth focussed on the Italian President’s decision to veto the coalition’s choice of a eurosceptic Finance Minister, but the real headline […]

By Dave Stockton PEDRO SANCHEZ, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), is now in the Moncloa Palace as prime minister of Spain. Every progressive person in the Spanish state will be glad to see the back of the Popular Party’s autocratic leader Mariano Rajoy. The critical moment came when the Basque Nationalist Party […]

João Moreira Salles’ thoughtful cinematic essay No Intenso Agora begins with Charles de Gaulle’s address to France on New Year’s Day 1968. A warm, almost grandfatherly figure, de Gaulle comments with palpable irony that although “the future is difficult to predict” he is pleased by the “happy, peaceful outlook that 1968 offers upon the nation”. […]

By Dave Stockton FIVE HUNDRED people, a large number of them of black Caribbean heritage, held a noisy rally outside Downing Street on Saturday 5 May, before taking the road and marching off to the Home Office, a mile away. “Windrush people here to stay, let’s deport Theresa May!” they chanted. The continuing anger on the […]

By Martin Suchanek ANNIVERSARIES NEVER serve as a mere recollection of a person’s historical work. When they are about an epoch-making theorist like Karl Marx, who together with his friend and companion in struggle Frederick Engels, founded “scientific socialism”, there are only two possibilities for the ruling class or the left wing of the bourgeoisie, […]