Ireland: The Lisbon Treaty Referendum has resulted in a
victory for the Yes camp by 67.1% to 32.9%. The result was in part due to the
enormous resources of the Yes campaign which had the support of big business,
Robbie Keane, the Bishops, Seamus Heaney and of all the government and main
opposition parties. The outcome was a dramatic reversal of the last referendum
with swings of more or less 20% in many constituencies.
In March of this year, the People’s Charter was launched at the House Of Commons and has since been backed by many labour movement organisations, trade union leaderships and the TUC. Based around six demands, the aim is to present a way forward which will ensure that the burden of the preesent crisis is not borne by working people. How effective are these demands? How could they be actually implemented? As part of the discussion which the Charter has opened up, we present the first of a number of articles which will seek to examine these demands from a Marxist perspective.
Strikes continue into their fourth week as refuse workers in Leeds fight to stop savage pay cuts that would leave them
up to six thousand pounds a year worse off. Workers for Street Scene, the council department responsible for refuse
collection, graffiti cleaning and disposal of needles, have been solidly
manning pickets at Cross Green depot, the main refuse depot for Leeds, and secondary pickets at various public rubbish
tips and smaller sites.
In the final part of his article, taken from a speech made last summer to a meeting of Marxists from around the world, Alan
Woods highlights the significance of the Iranian revolution and the
impact it will have on the whole of the Middle East and beyond. He
explains how all the conditions emerged for a successful revolution,
bar one, that of the revolutionary leadership, which must be built.
Fire fighters from all over the country
staged a mass demonstration in Barnsley on Tuesday 28th September in
support of South Yorkshire fire-fighters, who are
protesting against an arbitrary change of shift patterns forced upon them by
ultimatum by their bosses, South Yorkshire Fire Authority.
Socialists, trade unionists and activists are invited to an emergency
picket of the Honduras Embassy this Monday, 5th October between 4.00pm
and 6.00pm.
Sunday’s elections in Germany reveal an enormous
shift within the electorate. Of particular importance is the
massive decline of the SPD vote, mirrored by a huge increase in support
for DIE LINKE which stands to its left. The victory of the right-wing
parties means the German capitalists are preparing for an offensive
against the biggest and most powerful working class in Europe.
Between
Wednesday 23
and Friday 25
of September, supporters of Socialist Appeal could be found running a
stall outside the University of Leeds – bringing the ideas of
Marxism onto the campus. The comrades sold 24 copies of the new
Socialist
Appeal
all-colour paper over the three days as well as other literature
Nearly two decades ago. Robert Maxwell – former Labour MP, newspaper
tycoon and (so it turned out) conman died after ‘falling’ off his luxury
boat. Soon after all the scandals he was involved in were revealed to
an amazed world. He was living a great big lie and – worst of all – it
was at the expense of those former and then-current employees of the
Maxwell-owned Mirror Group who discovered that their pension fund had been milked dry by Maxwell.
Northern Ireland: A recent paper on the public spending of
the Stormont Executive confirms that cuts are on the way, which will hit
jobs and services. How will this affect the delicate political balance set up
by the Good Friday Agreement?
You
couldn’t make it up! About two years ago the banks in Britain, the USA and all over the world began to
go bust. It started over here with Northern Rock and culminated in the USA with the
collapse of the giant Lehman Brothers, the biggest corporate bankruptcy in
history. The problem for governments was that the banks were threatening to
take whole chunks of the capitalist system over the precipice with them. The
banking collapse and the ‘credit crunch’ were the triggers for a general crisis
of capitalism.