Britain

In the Guardian on September 4th George Monbiot gave a classic
example of PFI madness. In Coventry officials wanted to refurbish its
two hospitals.This would have cost £30m. They didn’t have £30m, so they had to go for PFI.

After weeks of media speculation the Brown bounce election became the general
election that never happened. Marx explained that the state and politics are like a superstructure that sits on top of society and maintains the appearance of having a certain independence. But in the final analysis, politics, the state and even bouncing Prime Ministers are organically connected to the real world. The prospect of a general election was just too risky.

King Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia is occupying the headlines of many newspapers with
his comments that Britain
failed to act on intelligence that could have prevented the 7/7 London bombings. Beyond
the response of the bourgeois media, what is the real relationship between the
West and Saudi Arabia?

The UK Social Atlas
states that British society is becoming more and more segregated into
classes, and British people are becoming more and more conscious of the
class society in which we live. The report ‘finds’ that Britain is
becoming increasingly segregated along the lines of class, education,
income, occupation, health status and family type.

You’ve probably never heard of Punch Taverns. But you may well have
had a drink in one of their 9,000 pubs. Chief executive Giles Thorley awarded
himself £11.3 million last. Punch Taverns
has the biggest gap between executive and workers’ pay in Britain.

Two years after the brutal shooting by police in London of Jean
Charles de Menezes, his family are no nearer
seeing anyone brought to justice. Jean was shot at least 8 times from
point blank range as he boarded a tube
train at Stockwell station in south London. We now know the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes
is considered by the British establishment as justified despite a
mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Speculation has reached fever pitch in the press over whether or not
Brown will call a snap General Election after only three months as
prime minister. With the Tories languishing in the polls, one giving
Labour an eleven percentage lead, and the government surviving the
different crises of foot and mouth, floods and the run on Northern
Rock, the young Turks of New Labour’s front bench are keen to launch an
election. However there is little enthusiasm amongst traditional Labour supporters and there are dangers of an economic crisis.

New Labour’s record on housing policy is a
disgrace. Reports say
we face a ‘housing time bomb’. There
are 1.6 million on council house waiting lists. Their numbers are
growing by 7.6% a year. Repossessions were up by 65% last year to
17,000 losing their homes, and official homelessness went up by 14.4%
between 2000 and 2005. Last year we built less houses than any year since the
1920s. And because so few new homes are being built, prices go up so as
to be completely unaffordable for the poorer in our society.

Everyday our television screens are filled with
images of horrific bloodshed and carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hundreds die,
men, women and children, in a single day. Some estimate that one million people
have perished since the invasion of 2003. This is the reality after more than
four years of foreign occupation.