In the Labour Party and among Trade Union leaders here in Wales, it is
thought defeatist and almost traitorous, to express the belief that
Labour may lose the General Election this year. We look at how things are panning out in Wales and what Labour really needs to do to avoid defeat in the coming elections.
When New Labour came to power in 1997, Tony Blair stated that his top
three priorities were “education, education, education”. 13 years
later, and figures from a recent poll
show that over two-thirds of people in England believe that the
government has failed to deliver the improvement in education that it
promised.
The bankers are celebrating their orgies. Wall Street banks are set to
shell out $65bn in bonuses to the speculators who fouled up so
spectacularly and brought the credit crunch down on our heads. Some of
this largesse will drop into the laps of dealers in the City of London
and Canary Wharf. Goldman Sachs alone will lash out $20bn and JP
Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America will stump up
another $65bn
This year, Britain experienced its coldest winter in over 30 years, and
as temperatures dropped below -20ºC in some parts of the UK, thousands
of people suffered the effects of one of society’s gravest ills: fuel
poverty.
According to official definitions, “a household is said to be in fuel
poverty if it needs to spend more than 10% of its income on fuel to
maintain an adequate level of warmth”; current figures estimate that
there are approximately 4.6 million “fuel poor” households in the UK.
The severity of the problem is such that the Office for National
Statistics calculated that there were 36,700 deaths in the winter of
2008/09 due to the cold weather.
Kingston upon Thames has become the latest target in ongoing attacks against the National Health Service.
Segments of the NHS are to be subject to renewed cuts and transfers
that will see medical care placed in the hands of the private sector.
The University of Leeds has proposed cutting up to 700 jobs, according
to the University and College Union. This is part of the university’s
attempt to cut its annual budget by £35 million. The Vice Chancellor,
Michael Arthur, has engineered these cuts, and the student union
refuses to oppose them. Leeds University is just one of dozens of
higher education institutes that will be crippled by a reduction in
funding. These attacks on jobs and education are the most severe since
the Thatcher years and must be resisted.
1980 saw the steelworkers become one of the first group of workers to
take on the new Thatcher Tory government, which had been elected in
1979. A union member involved at the time looks back at the action
which marked the start of the new decade.
Socialist Appeal recently published an appeal from IT workers at
Japanese-based multinational Futitsu, who have been taking strike
action up and down the country in Britain’s first ever national strike
of IT workers. The workers and their union, Unite, are incensed that
the highly-profitable IT services provider is attempting to scrap the
pension scheme and putting thousands of staff at risk of redundancy.
The news that Cadbury, the iconic chocolate making firm, has accepted a hostile bid from US based Kraft is clearly not good news for Cadbury workers given the huge debt Kraft is currently carrying. In an article wriiten just before the news broke we look at what all this could mean.
The
trade union campaign against the wage cuts announced in Lenihan’s
December budget will begin to escalate over the next few weeks as
different groups of workers across the public sector take action in
what is being portrayed as an ongoing campaign of selective action.
Today 20th January, the air traffic controllers are coming out, which will have a dramatic and very public effect on air travel. It’s
likely that the workers concerned in the various selective actions will
receive strike fund support in many cases and as such the campaign
could continue for a considerable time. But what is the underlying
situation and what are the issues for the movement?
Just about a month ago in
Coventry we were treated to a public meeting on the Road to Peace in
Afghanistan with local MP Bob Ainsworth, MoD, versus Bruce Kent of CND. For Bob
the issue was simple. We are there to help the Afghan people, to stop the
country becoming a failed state, to protect British interests, to fight
terrorism and to stop Pakistan collapsing as withdrawal of UK forces would mean
precisely that. Members of the audience asked a number of questions, all of
which failed to get an adequate answer.
Mick Brooks reviews a new play by David Hare which deals with the events surrounding the start of the great financial crisis.