No end in sight as Afghan adventure turns into a fully fledged disaster
[WORKERS, DECEMBER 2009]
Not for the first time in its history, Afghanistan is turning into a killing ground for British troops – and for Afghan civilians as well. The killings will go on until British troops are withdrawn…
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Finance capital isn’t working
[WORKERS, DECEMBER 2009]
Most people do not believe what they are being told about the state of the economy in Britain, if recent polls are anything to go by. It’s hardly surprising given the different stories we are being sold and the variety of cures that are proposed.
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Why workers need to run Britain
[WORKERS, DECEMBER 2009]
Capitalism depends on us. But the reverse is not true. Indeed, unless we strike out on our own we will never have what we want…
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Trade unionism, colonialist style
[WORKERS, DECEMBER 2009]
Unison has made an agreement with a predatory US union over recruiting members in three companies in Britain. It should tell the US union to go home…
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When 70 tulips sold for the price of 300 tons of butter
[WORKERS, DECEMBER 2009]
It was the world’s first financial bubble, and at the centre of it was a luxury flower and the world’s first futures market…
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Why is Brussels messing with our mail?
[WORKERS, NOVEMBER 2009]
It has issued a Directive on privatising postal services. One of its bureaucrats is even on secondment as a PostComm commissioner. And its own man, Mandelson, is involved…
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Coup in Honduras: an attack on progress, upheld by the United States
[WORKERS, NOVEMBER 2009]
What happens to a country run for generations by a tiny oligarchy when someone gets elected who challenges their power and the power of the American corporations?
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Land of the free? Tell that to American workers trying to get unions recognised
[WORKERS, NOVEMBER 2009]
When Barack Obama was elected, he promised a law to allow workers to choose to have collective bargaining. It has come up against massive opposition from industry and the US’s army of union-busting lawyers…
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Alfred the Great and the foundation of England
[WORKERS, NOVEMBER 2009]
As a nation we have our heroes, though we can often be coy about celebrating them. Workers looks at the life of a man who laid the basis for England – and for Britain…
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What Mandelson won’t tell the British public about cheap labour and EU trade talks
[WORKERS, OCTOBER 2009]
There’s a new threat to British workers that goes under the innocuous-sounding title of Mode 4. It is set to allow cheap labour to be brought from developing countries to work in Britain. It’s being negotiated by the European Union in talks set up by Peter Mandelson when he was EU Trade Commissioner. And it’s all being done in secrecy…
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Cuba: she won’t go away!
[WORKERS, OCTOBER 2009]
Black or white US President, change must be real. Obama must lift the 50-year-old inhuman blockade against America’s tiny neighbour, Cuba…
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Creeping privatisation of housing? Now it’s a full gallop
[WORKERS, OCTOBER 2009]
Far from rolling back the private sector in order to rebuild a truly public national housing system based on need, Labour is proposing to dismantle entirely the system of central subsidy that served the working class since the 1930s.…
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The Turner Review – capitalism indicts itself
[WORKERS, OCTOBER 2009]
The people who try to run finance capital find hindsight a lot easier than foresight…
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Mick Broderick, worker and singer, remembered
[WORKERS, OCTOBER 2009]
A working life in the shipyards combined with folk singing, monologues and drumming…
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Too much business as usual in the institution that is the TUC
[WORKERS, SEPTEMBER 2009]
After 141 years has the Trades Union become as institutionalised as the capitalist system we argue to change?
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The failure of capitalism
[WORKERS, SEPTEMBER 2009]
What are concerned and honest workers to make of the economic and political mess that they see around them as we enter the conference season?
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Professionalism matters: the attempt to undermine skill in nursing
[WORKERS, SEPTEMBER 2009]
The phasing out of state enrolled nurses that began in the 1980s should have given a boost to the professionalism of state registered nurses. But into the space they occupied have come hundreds of thousands of healthcare assistants not subject to any regulation…
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The rise and fall of the South Sea Bubble
[WORKERS, SEPTEMBER 2009]
Financial speculation, irresponsible behaviour in the City, massive government debt, shares slumping: three centuries ago, finance capital was learning its tricks…
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The refugees who don’t abandon nation
[WORKERS, JULY 2009]
Workers visits Palestinian refugee camps – and finds a people with no intention of abandoning their nation and drifting around Europe seeking charity…
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Unity, not devolution
[WORKERS, JULY 2009]
As workers try to act in a concerted way nationwide, new devolved powers would seek to divide them…
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Contracting fight flares up again
[WORKERS, JULY 2009]
Once again, the Lindsey oil refinery has become the flashpoint for the struggle for the right to work…
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Running out of drugs
[WORKERS, JULY 2009]
Helped by the government’s strategy of printing money, speculators are targetting the import and export of medicines – and the NHS is losing out…
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Western philosophy’s ‘greatest intellectual partnership’
[WORKERS, JULY 2009]
A new biography looks at the life and work of Frederick Engels, whose brilliant survey of the condition of the English working class was the prelude to joint authorship of the Communist Manifesto…
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Victory over employment of British workers – now there is a war to win
[WORKERS, JUNE 2009]
A second victory has been chalked up in what is part of the war to secure a future for Britain's construction industry. But, as ever, the value of winning this battle depends on the next steps and the lessons learned…
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Rail: the fight for the industry
[WORKERS, JUNE 2009]
Attacks on jobs, conditions, pensions, fares and safety. There’s a sustained attack on the rail industry – and the workers are fighting back…
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The acid test for any economy. What works? And what doesn’t work?
[WORKERS, JUNE 2009]
So-called “globalisation” doesn’t work. Even before this crisis, most of the world’s peoples were worse off than they were in 1989. But some things do work – self-reliance, controls on capital, protection, national liberation, workers’ nationalism and fighting for wages and jobs…
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Consistently malign: British foreign policy since 1870
[WORKERS, JUNE 2009]
Britain’s economy is the key to understanding its foreign policy, as a new book magnificently describes: leading to 140 years of devastating interventions…
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Make it in Britain – or see Britain decline
[WORKERS, MAY 2009]
The single most important feature distinguishing rich countries from poor is their greater manufacturing capabilities: their productivity is generally higher and tends to grow faster. All the evidence shows that countries cannot develop without industry, and to do this they need trade protection, mainly tariffs, and subsidies.
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A model of colonialism: the European Union’s unequal treaties
[WORKERS, MAY 2009]
In the European Union–South Africa trade agreement of 1999, the EU negotiated “special treatment” for itself by agreeing to cut tariffs on just 25 per cent of the goods South Africa exports to the EU while getting South Africa to cut tariffs on 40 per cent of the goods the EU exports to South Africa.
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Capital’s global ambitions got us into this mess – only workers’ nationalism can get us out
[WORKERS, MAY 2009]
It is now urgent for us to re-focus on Britain – the rest of the world thinks we’re bankrupt. Inevitably attention has been diverted by conflict and devastation in the Middle East over the past couple of months. They must look to their own future; we must deal with an emergency for our class, those we are responsible for, the people of Britain.
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From Guernica to Whitechapel, via the United Nations
[WORKERS, MAY 2009]
The huge tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, expressing the full horror of the bombing of civilians in the small Spanish town by that name in 1937, was displayed at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London from 5 to 18 April.
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G20: a giant with feet of clay
[WORKERS, APR 2009]
Another month, another summit. This April it’s the G20, hosted in London’s Docklands by a man on his way out. Each week brings news that makes Gordon Brown’s tenure as Prime Minister increasingly fragile. One of the triumvirate along with Blair and Mandelson who re-branded Labour for electoral purposes in the early 90s, Brown is suitably positioned to oversee its demise. As with Obama, Brown has no answers other than to shovel the cost of the massive debts incurred onto the working class in the form of the loans paid out to banks.
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The new strategy for councils: everything must go!
[WORKERS, APR 2009]
There was a time when the term “local council” or “the Local Authority” was a well-understood term in Britain. It referred to a provider of local services which was overseen by locally elected councillors whose decisions were made in full council or committee mostly open to the public.
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Where have all the health visitors gone?
[WORKERS, APR 2009]
The death of ‘Baby P’ in the London Borough of Haringey showed the inadequacy of various public bodies. Of course responsibility lay with the baby’s mother, her partner and another man who were convicted of involvement in his death, but there are many other failings and inconsistencies which have been highlighted.
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The beginnings of a passage into enlightenment
[WORKERS, APR 2009]
God’s fury, England’s fire: a new history of the English civil wars, by Michael Braddick, hardback, 758 pages, ISBN 978-0-7139-9632-6, Allen Lane, 2008, £30.
Cromwell: an honourable enemy. The untold story of the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland, by Tom Reilly, paperback, 316 pages, ISBN 1-84212-080-8, Phoenix Press, 2000, £10.99.
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Construction workers take up the challenge in the 21st-century Battle of Britain
[WORKERS, MAR 2009]
On 28 January engineering construction workers at Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) ignited the spark that is the 21st century Battle for Britain. French multinational Total, building new plant at its refinery at Immingham in North Lincolnshire, had appointed the US company Jacobs as main contractor. Jacobs in turn had removed the sub-contractor Shaws and appointed IREM – Italian/Sicilian – to take on the sub-contract.
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The fight for journalism
[WORKERS, MAR 2009]
Newspaper offices across Britain are in uproar as proprietors attempt to force through job cuts and pay freezes. Unlike some industries, publishing is not broke, and most of the employers trying to save on labour costs are making profits that other capitalists would give their right arms for.
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Rulings from Luxembourg that threaten our trade union organisation
[WORKERS, MAR 2009]
As industrial workers in the oil and other industries show signs of life and reveal that the emperor has got no clothes, even using the unmentionable M-word, migration, the malign effect of European Union membership and legislation is oh-so-slowly becoming apparent to even some of its closest adherents.
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It’s not a crime to watch football, is it?
[WORKERS, MAR 2009]
Occasionally the state reacts dramatically against the rights of the people, bringing in the police or army against strikers, perhaps, or enacting openly repressive laws. But usually the process is more incremental, a gradual whittling away of rights and customs won by working people over generations, as in Britain today.
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End Israeli oppression
[WORKERS, FEB 2009]
The horrific attacks on the Palestinian population of Gaza by the Israeli military demand new clear thinking about this 60-year-old problem.
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The ‘free market’: farming’s road to ruin
[WORKERS, FEB 2009]
Walk into a supermarket in Britain, and you’re often hard pushed to find fruit and vegetables grown this country. Depending on the whims of the global market, even British onions can be hard to find. Instead, we are presented with lettuces from Spain, beans from Uganda or Guatemala, strawberries from the USA. The only constant is that prices just seem to go up all the time.
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Read the history: Yes, barriers on free trade can stimulate economic development
[WORKERS, FEB 2009]
The “stabilise, liberalise and privatise” mantra has been imposed on developing countries by international financial institutions since the 1980s. But it has not gone unopposed. A fascinating book* written by two senior UN economists explodes the myths behind the mantra.
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Healthcare tourism is not the answer
[WORKERS, FEB 2009]
Is health-care tourism to replace adequate healthcare provision? There has been much in the news recently about what is becoming known as cross-border health care – the growing trend for people to be treated in a country other than their own.
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Running out of ideas? Print money!
[WORKERS, FEB 2009]
When all else fails, print money. How economics is too important to be left to capitalists – and that workers will always pay the bill – is well illustrated by events from over 80 years ago, in the period just after the First World War.
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2009: There is a future, and it begins here…
[WORKERS, JAN 2009]
In a land swamped by doubt and diffidence, we declare there is “a way through” the gloom. There is “a way out” of relentless harassment, encirclement, and destruction of all we hold dear.
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Proposals to ease meat hygiene regulations don’t pass inspectors
[WORKERS, JAN 2009]
We have heard much in recent months about the parlous state of what are passed off as pay campaigns in the public services, particularly in local government. One pay campaign hasn’t yet received much coverage but is an interesting and so far successful one.
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How Cuba dealt with economic disaster
[WORKERS, JAN 2009]
Without a working class alternative to capitalism, there is the probability that we will get dragged down with capitalism and face disaster. Such alternatives do not magically appear. They must be fought for by workers and they will come about only by a working class taking responsibility for its own future. It may sound a hard thing to do but there are examples of workers taking responsibility for their own future that we can learn from.
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Three books to start off the new year
[WORKERS, JAN 2009]
The ills of finance capital could fill entire libraries – here are three books that look at different aspects of its failure.
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