Urte March reviews Corbynism: What Went Wrong by Martin Thomas (AWL)

By Tim Nailsea STAGECOACH DRIVERS, engineers and cleaners in Scotland, Chesterfield, Manchester, the North-East, Lancashire and Liverpool and South Wales are all balloting, or have already been balloted for strike action. The issues are broadly the same everywhere. Despite working throughout the pandemic at considerable personal risk, drivers have either not been awarded a pay […]

By Dave Stockton AFTER 40 years of war Afghanistan momentarily seemed to be at peace after the Taliban took power for the second time in mid-August. But the Taliban have taken over a devastated country. Famine About one-third of the country’s population of 38 million is facing ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis’ levels of food insecurity, according […]

By Urte March ON THE border between Belarus and its EU neighbours— Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania—refugees from the global south are once again being used as pawns in a vicious inter-state power struggle. Embattled Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has been accused by the EU of manufacturing a migrant ‘crisis’ for the EU in retaliation for […]

By Rebecca Anderson THERE IS a real opportunity for coordinated strike action between two of Britain’s largest workforces: council workers, including school support staff, and hospital employees. If successful, it could bust the public sector pay freeze and build momentum in private sector struggles for substantial pay rises. Local government and school staff have been […]

By Rebecca Anderson THE COP26 climate conference of world leaders, meeting this month in Glasgow, has been billed as the ‘last best chance to get runaway climate change under control’. Each government will bring forward national climate plans under the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Yet even before COP26 […]

By Carlos Uchoa Magrini and Assiria Conti ON 7 SEPTEMBER Brazil’s far right president Jair Bolsonaro called hundreds of thousands of his supporters onto the streets across the huge country—100,000 in Sao Paolo alone. Contingents from the army, especially the military police, marched in uniform, carrying their guns. Truckers blockaded highways for hours. Counter-demonstrations by […]

By Joe Crathorne BETWEEN 600,000 and 1.2 million undocumented migrants and asylum seekers live in Britain, around 50,000 of whom are each year rounded up and sent to detention centres to be processed and, usually, deported. At any one time up to 3,500 are held indefinitely in prison-like detention centres. These workers, whose only crime […]

By Dave Stockton THE CONFEDERATION of British Industries (CBI), representing 190,000 companies, warned on 18 October that ‘acute’ labour shortages will spread across more and more industries, from construction and distribution to retail and healthcare. And this crisis could last as long as two years. Though hospitality trades have enjoyed a strong bounce-back, this sector […]

By Tim Nailsea BRITAIN’S ECONOMIC growth has almost stalled because of shortages of labour in parts of industry and of material inputs, due to disruptions in the supply chain, coupled with the effects of Brexit. GDP grew by 0.4% in August but is still 0.8% below where it was in February 2020, before the country […]

‘NEGOTIATIONS ARE about give and take … We are not cowards because we have taken a compromise,’ said the self-styled ‘socialist revolutionary’ Irvin Jim, general secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa). Immediately after, he ordered 155,000 steelworkers back to work, ending their three-week strike. This wasn’t just ‘compromise’; it was […]

By KD Tait ON SATURDAY 16 October tens of thousands attended an anti-fascist demonstration in Rome, called by the CGIL trade union, in response to a fascist attack on the union’s headquarters the previous week. On 9 October thousands of people had attended a protest against the Green Pass, a covid passport which provides proof […]

By Alex Rutherford THE GOVERNMENT and Labour are exploiting the murder of David Amess MP to whip up fears around ‘online anonymity’ in order to ram through a raft of measures giving the government unprecedented control over online free speech. The Bill has been on the cards for some time – the draft text was […]

Editorial November 2021, No. 388

By Rebecca Anderson THE TRIAL of Wayne Couzens for the murder of Sarah Everard has shone a spotlight on violence against women and the inability of the police and judicial system to confront the problem. For months after Sarah’s murder the Metropolitan Police and Home Office dismissed any notion that there was a deep-seated prejudice […]