Burning cars, broken glass, looting and an entire community enraged at the violent actions of those who are supposed to protect them. This describes the situation not in Greece or 80s Liverpool, but Tottenham, London on 6th August 2011. In this article we look at the background to these events demonstrate the underlying cause lies in the crisis of capitalism.
The riots which started in the Tottenham area of North London on
Saturday night and which have since spread to many others parts of the
capital have exposed the social decay within the city as we enter the
final year before the start of the prestige Olympics.
The recent
brutal and outrageous attack in Norway on the Scandinavian and
international workers’ movement was a huge shock, not only for those
members of the Norwegian Labour Party Youth (AUF) who were at the summer
cap at the island of Utøya, but also for the whole population of
Scandinavia.
A deal to
raise the debt ceiling has now been reached, after weeks of incredible
fear-mongering on the part of both bosses’ parties and Wall Street, and
will reach the President’s desk by the deadline on August 2nd. The
contents of the final agreement remain rather vague, but the broad
outline is enough to make clear what it means for workers in the U.S.
If the report in Today’s edition of the Guardian (click here
to read it) is to be believed it seems that the Labour leadership has
decided to ignore any of the good stuff which may have come out of the
Refounding Labour consultation exercise and instead dig up some old
Blairite/New Labour garbage. Yet again, they want to dilute the union
presence in the party decision making process. Given that the mood in
the movement is for a more powerful annual conference rather than the
jamboree it became under Blair, Ed Miliband has offered up some
‘reforms’ of his own.