Labour's conference will debate a motion calling for a major reduction in working hours. URTE MARCH looks at the history and implications for socialist strategy

Whatever name they go by, popular fronts inevitable subordinate the interests of the workers to the need to maintain the alliance with the bosses

Differences within Left Unity, the ruling faction of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), have prompted the Socialist Party to launch a faction within that faction, the Broad Left Network. At the same time, the PCS Rank and File Network is being launched. This raises the question of how best to organise in the unions – rank and file or broad left?

Meeting in Lisbon in March 2000, the leaders of the European Union, on the initiative of its dominant powers, Germany and France, pledged to "make Europe, by 2010, the most competitive and the most dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world". Two decades later, the European Union has instead become the “weakest link” in the imperialist world order.

With the onset of the dry season in the Amazon region, an inferno of forest fires has hit the Brazilian states of Rondônia, Pará, Mato Grosso and Amazonas. Satellite images show rainforest the size of one and a half football pitches being consumed every minute.This is a disaster not only for the inhabitants of the Amazon region itself but for everyone on the planet.

On September 4, Hong Kong's Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, finally agreed to withdraw the hated Extradition Bill altogether, and not just leave it on the shelf. If the Bill had become law it would have allowed extradition of anybody on Hong Kong territory for trial on the mainland. Although presented as simply a measure to prevent criminals taking refuge in Hong Kong, it could also have been used against journalists and political dissidents and , indeed, almost anyone doing business on the mainland, where corruption is rife.

THANKS TO NEIL KINNOCK’S counterrevolution against the democratic reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Blair’s in the 1990s and 2000s, Jeremy Corbyn and his team inherited a Labour Party in which the leadership could prevent the membership from either determining party policy or who should represent them in parliament.

Despite the youthfulness of the movement that brought Corbyn to power, it was years before Corbynites made serious inroads into Labour’s bureaucratic and virtually moribund youth organisations, which had been exploited for decades as merely a conveyor belt between universities and the party apparatus.

WITH THE COMMONS VOTE TO TAKE CONTROL of its agenda and the passage of a Bill preventing No Deal, the constitutional coup of Boris Johnson and his sinister advisor Dominic Cummings has been thwarted – for now. If the Bill becomes an act of parliament and is transmitted as a request for delay until January then a general election becomes a near certainty.