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Now Gordon Brown has handed over the reins as Chancellor to
Alistair Darling it transpires that for the past ten years Gordon has been
displaying the fiscal prudence of a drunken sailor. The British government has
the biggest hole in their finances in Europe, a whopping £43bn – and it could
get up to £50bn. Where has it all gone?
It is a frightening possibility that, on May 2nd,
Londoners could wake up to find they have an extreme right-wing Tory as Mayor
of London. This is a truly scary scenario. Opinion polls show Boris the
Bumbling Buffoon – whom most regarded as a joke candidate when he threw his hat
into the ring – is creeping up on Ken.
School students, Ewan Gibbs and Nathan Morrison, give their views on the latest proposals on British citizenship. In this report issued by Lord
Goldsmith it states that school-leavers should take an oath of allegiance to ‘Queen
and Country’ and suggests that schools should hold citizenship ceremonies for
leavers. These proposals were made by a big business Labour government desperate to cover the glaring cracks in our public
services, below inflation pay rises, the imperialist military adventures in
Iraq and Afghanistan and the Northern Rock farce by resorting to flag
waving.
Last year saw the fortieth anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales – it took over a decade for Scotland and Northern Ireland to catch-up. Gay people had won the right to have sex: as long as you were both over 21, the curtains were shut, the doors closed, there was nobody else in the house and you weren’t in the armed forces. Oddly enough heterosexuals have never had to fight for this very limited privilege.
Alan Woods was invited to speak at Eton, the
most prestigious private school in Britain (known as a “public” school in
English), by the school’s Orwell Society. Alan gave a very clear explanation of
why society needs to be changed and why the only direction in can go in is
socialism. We believe the points raised and the answers given provide a very
good outline of what Marxism stands for today.
We are now due another flu pandemic. This is nothing to do with some
evil ‘Spooks’ style conspiracy but a fact of life. Every 37 years or
so, the flu virus mutates or morphs into a new strain that humans
haven’t suffered before. A dilemma for the State – they have spent the past decade whipping us into work, regardless of how ill we were.
The date is the
second of November 2007. Trade unionists from the Sinaltrainal food industry union walk into the central
cafeteria of the Universidad Pontificia, to find an envelope addressed to them from the Black Eagles’ Front of the
AUC, the supposedly disbanded right-wing paramilitary organization. The
contents of this letter were as follows…
British Gas delared record £571m profits this year. Regulator Ofgem has
claimed the energy giants are making £9 billion in windfall profits. As
soon as the government talks about a windfall profits tax or even
suggests these monster companies do something about ‘fuel poverty’ they
threaten to cut investment in clean energy. As Julia Finch (Guardian
5th March) says "Their audacity knows no bounds." Do we control them or
do they control us and the government? The case is overwhelming. We need
to take back the fuel companies into public ownership. Then we’ll pocket
the profits
The government has finally been forced to nationalise Northern Rock after months of dithering. They have wasted more than £55 billion of our money – to no purpose. The ‘geniuses’ who ran the Rock as a capitalist bank made a total hash of it and lost billions of pounds of other people’s money. It’s not just the bank’s management who stand indicted. The whole capitalist system is shown to be based on swindling and gambling.
An analysis of the growing political and social turbulence in Europe,
the United States, Latin America with an emphasis on Venezuela, the
Middle East and Asia with particular emphasis on the explosive
situation in Pakistan and ends with an appeal to help build the
International Marxist Tendency in all countries. At this stage it is a
discussion document.
This is the first part of a draft document on World Perspectives as approved at the recent meeting of the leadership of the International Marxist Tendency. At this stage it is a discussion document.
This British perspectives draft document (2008), agreed on February
3rd, has been issued by the Socialist Appeal editorial board as part of
a wide-ranging discussion about the likely development of events in
British society. Such a document is not a blue-print, but an attempt to
understand the underlying processes at work in Britain today, and how
these will be reflected in the class struggle. The document will be
discussed at the Socialist Appeal conference at the end of April. Part 1. Part 2.