Caroline Flint, the new
Housing Minister has proposed that new tenants on council estates will have to
sign up to "actively seek work" as a condition of their tenancy. So now it’s a
case of "no dog, no cat, no loud music, keep the place spick and span and you
must get a job". There is something
disturbingly familiar about this rubbish: it’s like the old Victorian notion of the deserving and
undeserving poor.
Former military heads of
the British army have attacked proposals for Parliament to have to
approve any declaration of war made by the British state. The ruling class is
eager to keep a direct grip on its bodies of armed men; the police and the military,
the chief instruments of class suppression. These are vital to the ruling
class’ ability to keep control of society, and sections of the boureoisie are
reluctant to relinquish them even to their own organs of so-called democratic rule.
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.
Since 1979 UK child
poverty has doubled. In 2006, 3.8 million children were living in poverty in
homes on less than 60% of average income. Although this is a fall of about
600,000 since 1998, this still leaves 500,000 children above the Government’s
own target. This is not the whole picture either – poverty in the whole
population is increasing.
From The Guardian, Wednesday
January 23, 2008: Individual hopes of betterment through education
are often destroyed by the fear of debt, says John McDonnell, who asks why then
is the government ensuring the private sector profits from it.
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’
Pentrich in Derbyshire is a quiet place these days. But in 1817 it was the centre of a plot to
overthrow the Government of the day. Britain had been at war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic
France almost continuously until 1815. When war ended, the
economy slumped. It was the poor who had borne the brunt
of the fighting. Now they were required to bear the economic and
social fallout from the subsequent peace.
The liberation of women and the socialist revolution are inseperable tasks requiring the active participation of women workers in the organised labour movement. This recording of Barbara Humphries speaking at the Socialist Appeal xmas day school explains the double expoitation of women under the capitalist system, the history of women in the labour movement, the impact of imperialist aggression on women and the nature of feminism and positive discrimination.
Sixty years ago Railway companies up and down the
country were nationalised. They were not necessarily nationalised for
ideological reasons – the vast majority were were hindering the
development of the British economy after the Second World War. At the time the
view was that you cannot plan what you don’t control and you can’t
control what you don’t own. That view still holds true today.
Over Christmas the railways were in chaos – again. Why does
this sort of thing happen in Britain? It hasn’t always been like this. The
problem started with privatisation. The Tories under John Major plotted a
privatisation so stupid that even Thatcher had thought better of it.
Seventy-five years ago today, on January 30th 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Two months later the Reichstag voted him dictatorial powers. The workers’ parties were banned and their leaders thrown into concentration camps. The strongest labour movement in Europe was destroyed without even breaking a pane of glass, as Hitler boasted. The way was clear for genocide and world war.
“The new generation, in particular, must understand the part Stalinism played in German events prior to Hitler’s seizure of power, if they wish to understand its present role”, wrote Ted Grant in 1944. The Stalinists surrendered the German masses to Hitler and even proclaimed the coming to power of Hitler as a victory expressing the crisis of capitalism, boastfully proclaiming ‘our turn next’.