February 2008

When I was a councillor in Merton back in the eighties, a young Tory member accused me of having been a leading light in the Winter of Discontent locally. Her name was Teresa May and she was totally wrong.Far from organising picket rotas, during the winter of 78/79 I was hanging around the gates of the girls school on my Fizzy, thrashing a punk rock electric guitar down the youth club and trying to convince my parents that I was actually working really hard on my O levels. It wasn’t until a year or two later that I took my […]

The big
corporations in North America, Western Europe and Japan are moving more
of their factories abroad in search of lower wages. But in the process
they are tying the interests of the international working class closer together. In North America Ford workers prepare to weather a new round
of closures and layoffs, while their bosses have unveiled
plans for new plants in China, a country with the world’s fastest
growing car market along with rock-bottom wages. Meanwhile, Russian
Ford workers have won an important victory not only against the company
but against the new, repressive Russian Labor Code.

The
Iranian regime has raised the level of repression against many sections
of society, especially against students. To show solidarity with the imprisoned students a
number of Iranian opposition groups are organising pickets outside the
Iranian regime’s diplomatic missions on Saturday 16 February 2008.

The construction industry consists of roughly 1.2 million workers at
present, a massive boost for the capitalists and the UK economy. Just
think how much can be made once all the new office blocks and
‘affordable’ housing, and not forgetting the Olympic Games, are built.
Any chance of the workers who build these new structures getting a
slice of the cake? You are more likely to be sacked or even killed on a
building site in Britain today.

In 2006 a report from the UN showed
that the world’s richest two percent of adults owned more than half the
global wealth, while half the world’s population own only one percent.
Inequality has been increasing, particularly over the last decade, with
the rich getting richer, the mega rich getting richer quicker than the
rich, and the poor getting even poorer, with the number of people
living on less than $2 a day increasing.

If there was one man who embodied the spirit of revolutionary democracy,
it was Tom Paine. He inspired the American Revolution of 1776, took part
in the French Revolution of 1789 and, while abroad in France, was tried
in Britain for seditious libel for writing his book ‘The Rights of Man’