By KD Tait ON 1 FEBRUARY hundreds of thousands of teachers, lecturers, civil servants and train drivers struck in the biggest coordinated day of action for many years. In London alone, 50,000 strikers marched in the biggest weekday demonstration since the protest against Donald Trump’s visit in 2018. Tens of thousands more marched in towns […]

Editorial February 2023, No. 400

By Andy Yorke WINTER IS here and along with it the deepest NHS crisis yet. Despite the respite from covid in 2022, waiting lists hit an all-time record of 7.2 million in December, with up to 500 excess deaths a week as a result of delays. A record number of patients waited over 12 hours […]

By Jeremy Dewar PRIME MINISTER Rishi Sunak and business secretary Grant Shapps are rushing the Strikes (minimum service levels) Bill through parliament in order to deny workers the right to strike in six named sectors: health, transport, education, fire and rescue, nuclear power decommissioning and border security. Once signed off by King Charles it will […]

IN A historic first, nurses in the RCN union, pushed to breaking point, have joined the strike wave against the cost of living crisis. And despite media attempts to probe for public disapproval, they have massive support. A million patients are treated in the NHS every 36 minutes, and they are overwhelmingly grateful to and […]

By Dave Stockton THE 23–24 February is the first anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine War. On that night, 190,000 Russian armed forces launched a massive attack on the country. Their aim was to occupy its capital, overthrow its government and overawe its people. Putin called it a ‘special military operation’. In fact, it was a […]

By Alex Rutherford WITH A new winter of discontent, rising prices, a growing strike wave and scandals ranging from tax penalties to kidnapped child refugees, it is no wonder that many commentators are predicting that Rishi Sunak’s career as Prime Minister may be a short one. From the perspective of the working class, the shorter […]

By R. Banks THE GOVERNMENT’S mistreatment of asylum seekers has come into public focus in recent weeks through a series of scandals, highlighting serious safeguarding failures and violations of basic human rights. It began with the Manston processing centre, a former military base in Kent. The site was intended to process 1,000 to 1,600 people […]

By Tim Nailsea IN THE wake of the massive repression which has, for the time being at least, suppressed the mass protest movement, following the murder of Mahsa Amini by Iran’s ‘morality police’. The UK and the European Union are taking measures to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a ‘terrorist organisation’. The IRGC […]

By Alex Rutherford and Marcel Rajecky ON 30 DECEMBER, the Israeli parliament voted into office a government headed by Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. This time, Netanyahu has included in his coalition representatives of a number of extreme religious and far right parties, who form the Religious Zionism (RZ) bloc. A statement by Netanyahu on the […]

By Dave Stockton THE FIRST issue of Workers Power as a monthly paper appeared in October 1978. Its headline Smash the Five Per Cent Limit related to a situation we face today: a government trying to impose a ceiling on wages for public sector workers. Though the government then was a Labour administration, many of […]

By Jeremy Dewar THE METROPOLITAN Police is infested with violent misogynists. This isn’t rhetorical exaggeration. It’s a fact. Twelve serving Met officers have been convicted of sexual offences against women since the murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021, one every two months. Met Commissioner Mark Rowley admits this is only the tip of the […]