A Saudi girl of 19 was raped 14 times by a gang of seven. What did the Saudi state do for her? It jailed her for six months and sentenced her to 200 lashes for the crime of being alone with a man who was not a relative. What did Gordon Brown do for the cause of human rights, so dear to his heart? He set up a royal banquet at Buckingham Palace for King Abdullah, who, apart from his other crimes, is an accessory to gang rape.
In Britain and
internationally supermarket chains have come to dominate the food distribution
market. The tendency to monopolisation is evident. But with it go many
practices that literally endanger our health, and with it also working
conditions, wages, the environment and so on. The only answer is to take them
over, remove the profit motive and run them in the interests of all working
people.
Andrew Glyn died from a brain tumour on 22 December 2007. He was 64 years old. A fellow of Corpus Christi College
in Oxford since
1969, he was a leading socialist economist for all that time.
Andrew left a wealth
of important writing that analysed the development of post-war capitalism. His best-known works were British capitalism, workers and the profits
squeeze with Bob Sutcliffe in 1972; Capitalism
since 1945 with Phil Armstrong and the late John Harrison in 1984 and most
recently, Capitalism Unleashed
(2006), reviewed earlier.
A single mother in Keighley is being evicted
from her residence with two months notice. The ‘owner’ of the property does not
claim any fault on the part of the worker; calling her an exemplary tenant.
The move is sound business; house prices may fall so it would be better to cash
in now and let someone else (e.g. someone poorer) take the loss. Yet this woman
is a nurse suffering attacks at work by privatisations, and a mother of four
with no other housing options.
The murder of Benazir Bhutto has led to an explosion of popular anger. Pakistan is convulsed by rioting and mass protests. Society has been stirred up to the depths. Raw human emotion has spilled over onto the streets of every city, town and village. The army and police are powerless to halt the tide of indignation. The government is shaken to the core.
The following leaflet of the Pakistani comrades of The Struggle was distributed on a grand scale in which they demand an end of the cruel capitalist system, its cruel institutions, imperialist hegemony, and religious terrorism.