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In certain conditions, all things can turn into their opposite. Prior to the arrival of its latest resident, the White House had long been a symbol of the immense stability and confidence of the USA’s political regime. As Josh Holroyd explains, today it stands at the centre of an almighty political crisis.
The Chancellor’s Budget began to unravel at lightning speed as soon as he had sat down from delivering his speech. Hammond’s humiliating climb down clearly demonstrates that the Tory government is in a complete shambles as it hurtles towards the cliff edge of Brexit. The time is ripe for Corbyn’s Labour to go on the offensive with a socialist alternative.
After already being in dispute for several months with bosses at Southern Rail, strikes by railway workers in defence of safety, terms, and conditions have now spread to other areas of the country. On 13th March, strikes were seen at Southern stations, and also at Merseyrail and Northern Rail stations too. We publish here a couple of reports from the picket lines.
Nicola Sturgeon this week finally delivered the speech that had seemed almost inevitable ever since the Brexit vote in June last year. By announcing her intention to seek a second independence referendum, Sturgeon has started a political storm that will likely rage on – at the very least – until any referendum takes place, and possibly far beyond.
Cleaning staff at the London School of Economics are taking unprecedented strike action for two days on 15-16th March in their fight for decent pay and conditions. The example of the LSE cleaners – and their campaign alongside students and other staff – shows the way forward in the fight against exploitation in the workplace.
A Marxist Student Federation member came a respectable second in the King’s College London student union elections, which concluded last week. Running on an openly socialist programme, Joe Attard of the KCL Marxist Society received 500 votes, demonstrating a real appetite for radical ideas at a traditionally conservative university.
Grassroots Momentum held its founding conference last weekend, at which around 200 activists voted on the faction’s aims and values as the radical voice of local Momentum groups. The militancy on display at the conference now needs to be channelled into transforming Labour into a fighting mass movement with a bold socialist programme.
We publish here a letter by a regular Socialist Appeal reader, Martin Hartnett, a Unite the Union convenor in Coventry, who replies to the right-wing attacks made against Len McCluskey and Jeremy Corbyn in the wake of the Copeland by-election defeat. The Labour right wing are throwing all their support behind Coyne in the proxy war for the Party’s future.
After years of privatisation, mismanagement and cuts, social care in the UK is now undoubtedly beyond crisis point. The Tory government clearly has no plan for social care. Labour must call for care to immediately be brought under public control and integrated into the NHS, to provide decent social care on the basis of needs not profits.
The history of Bolshevism from the very early days right up to the Russian revolution contains a wealth of lessons on how it is the class struggle that provides the final answer to the women’s question. In this article, Marie Frederiksen looks at the approach of the Bolshevik Party to the women’s question from its early days, right through to the revolution and after taking power.
The elections on 2nd March to the Northern Ireland Assembly have shattered all of the old certainties enshrined in the sectarian monolith established by the Good Friday Agreement. The elections have done nothing to shift the political deadlock, but have instead brought to the surface all of the contradictions in the North.
Every year on 8th March, International Women’s Day is celebrated all over the world. This year, it has particular significance because it is also the centenary of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which was sparked by a mass movement of women workers exactly 100 years ago, beginning a revolution that made spectacular gains for women.