The TUC, has obtained figures from 185 hospitals, 126 primary care, 23 ambulance and 54 mental health trusts showing 53,150 NHS job cuts in the next four years, writes Mark Booth.

Women bear the brunt of the Tory cuts with job losses in the public sector and attacks on health and social care services for children and families. Joy Macready examines the attacks and also looks at how to fight back

Tens of thousands of young people, students, teachers, and public-sector workers are rallying in Madison, Wisconsin and occupying the State Capitol in opposition to proposed sweeping anti-union legislation. From the website of Revolution Socialist youth USA – revousa.org

Muammar Abu al-Gadaffi, Libya’s brutal dictator, has used his armed forces to slaughter pro-democracy protesters, a vicious act unseen in Tunisia or Egypt writes Simon Hardy.

Local trade unionists and community campaigners occupy Lambeth town hall 23/02/2011 400 protesters demonstrated in Lambeth town hall tonight. The Labour councillors, supported by the Lib dems and Tories, wanted to vote in their package of cuts. The people of Lambeth demanded that they should be in the public gallaries. Despite filling one public gallery, […]

Today, at around 1pm, half an hour before Leeds Council were due to meet to pass a budget of swingeing cuts, hundreds braved the rain to lobby the meeting to refuse to implement the budget. Around 75-100 people managed to occupy the main council chamber, where the meeting was to be held. Many more gathered […]

Birmingham City Council has announced that £300 million will be cut from the budget over the next four years. This will involve the loss of 7,116 full time jobs, that is 37 per cent of the workforce, reports Bernie McAdam. The losses will increase to 10,000 when part time jobs are included. The Con Dem […]

A campaign of repression against the growing resistance to the cuts exposes collusion between the different arms of the state – the police, courts, intelligence agencies – even drawing in the supposedly independent media. With the aid of the right-wing papers, the police are trying to demonise students that took to the streets in the […]

Egypt is aflame with revolution. The world has watched with bated breath as millions of Egyptians have shown that they will not be intimidated and coerced any longer. A general strike has been proclaimed and on 1 February two million demonstrators packed the vast Tahrir (Liberation) Square in Cairo demanding Hosni Mubarak’s departure. His dictatorial […]

The League for the Fifth International, of which Workers Power is the British section, held a successful congress in Sri Lanka in January. Members from Germany, Austria, and Britain met with delegates from the Pakistan and Sri Lankan sections of the League to discuss the issues facing the international working class. This congress was the […]

Consistent opponents of Israel’s occupation have long argued that the “moderate” Palestinian leaders of Fatah are in reality collaborators with Israel. Nothing could have confirmed this more conclusively than the release by news agency Al Jazeera of documents exposing 10 years of futile “peace” negotiations. The picture that emerges is of weak and grovelling Palestinian […]

David Kato was bludgeoned to death in his home with a hammer on 26 January. David was a gay rights activist in Uganda, leading the Sexual Minorities Uganda (Smug) campaigning organisation. David knew he was a target in a country renown for its anti-gay laws. It is already an offence, punishable by 14 years in […]

The flight of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on 14 January came as culmination of a month of street mobilisations, starting with young unemployed youth in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, spreading nationwide, drawing in industrial workers, teachers and lawyers. Demonstrations in Tunis calling for Ben Ali to go climaxed into […]

Across the country, local councillors are voting on job cuts and the destruction of much needed services. At the same time, hundreds, sometimes thousands demonstrate outside, trying to block or slow down proceedings in the council chambers. Both sides know this could mark the beginning of a mass movement against the cuts. The job losses […]

The Conservative whitepaper, “Equity and Excellence: liberating the NHS”, is designed to transfer control for £80 billion pounds of the NHS budget to the private health sector. It means the end of the NHS as a publicly owned and operated service, and its transformation into little more than a brand name, which health corporations will […]

In the first two years of the Global Financial Crisis, everyone seemed to know where the blame lay – with the huge banks that pushed the international system of borrowing and lending into chaos. Yet slowly but surely the politicians regrouped and shifted the debate away from criticism of the bankers, blaming the crisis on […]

Yesterday over 4000 students, workers and youth took to the streets of Manchester against the Con Dem cuts to EMA, education funding, and the public sector. Official ‘leaders’ of the movement tried to hold back protesters from expressing their anger. But they only showed their increasing irrelevance to the struggle. Many activists held placards declaring […]

When the NUS NEC passed a strategy document, supported by NUS president Aaron Porter for the student movement on 10 January, they showed once again that they want to plead and negotiate with the Con Dem government, rather than organise a fight to stop their plans. The document agreed to sponsor the Manchester demonstration on […]

National Union of Students President Aaron Porter will be facing an election challenge at this years NUS conference, as left-wing student activists announced they would group together to form an anti-cuts, anti-fees slate. Joana Pinto, press officer for the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, and Workers Power member, will be standing for the Vice […]

Teachers, civil servants and lecturers are set to lose tens of thousands of pounds from their pensions over a lifetime because the government wants to peg them to the retail price index, which does not take account of the real rise in living costs, in particular housing costs. On top of this, teachers will typically […]

The Communication Workers Union has taken to the streets to protest against plans to privatise Royal Mail. The Coalition has broken yet another promise: that private capital would only take a minority stake in Royal Mail. Now we face a full-blown sell-off. Promises to safeguard post offices and the Universal Service Obligation (to deliver equally […]

What is a revolutionary situation “… a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? […] (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is […]

“No one was talking about a general strike.” This is how Brendan Barber opened his account of the 28 January TUC summit to a BBC radio interviewer. How odd, I wonder, how many other people start a report with a denial? It reminded me of Len McCluskey’s article in The Guardian just before Christmas. He […]

The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have inspired millions of people around the world. In Tunisia mass demonstrations routed the police of dictator Ben Ali – then a general strike drove him out of the country. Dragged into a spiral of mass unemployment, of price rises and poverty, the poor, the youth and the workers […]

The November-December demonstrations by school and university students blew away the stifling atmosphere that had built up within the Labour movement like a cold but bracing wind. So when young people stormed the Tory HQ and then carried on mobilising for over a month despite hysterical witch hunting by the media and violent police repression […]

The crisis inside the national Shop Stewards Network has come to a head and resulted in the inevitable parting of the ways between the Socialist Party on the one hand and virtually every other tendency on the other. By pushing through their motion to set up an NSSN anti-cuts campaign in opposition to the Coalition […]

David Cameron announced it was full steam ahead with the government spending cuts after it was announced that the economy had worsened. Why? Because the government aims to slash wages and services irrespective of the economics damage, writes Keith Spencer The UK economy contracted by 0.5 per cent in the last quarter of 2010, it […]

Coalition of Resistance: National Council agrees to fight all the cuts Andrew Burgin of Stop the War opened the first meeting of the National Council with a statement of solidarity with the Tunisian uprising, saying, “It is only a matter of time before the police kill someone here,” referring to student Alfie Meadows and disabled […]

The council room of Camden Town Hall was packed out on the evening of Monday 10 January for the launch meeting of Camden United Against the Cuts. Camden’s financial crisis is one of the worst in London and the sheer scale of the cuts is historic. With £80 to £100 million to be lost from […]

Dave Stockton looks in depth at the call for a general strike in Britain today