Britain has served the EU with notice to quit and the world has changed. It was a brave declaration, born of clarity and determination. When it counted the working class stood up and shouted The fiercely independent spirit of British workers at its best. We’ll need more of that in the coming months and years.
Barack Obama is not the first US president to lecture Britain about its place in the world. But he certainly chose a bizarre way to threaten the people of this country.
We have said that the fight to ditch the EU is the “decisive confrontation” facing the working class this year. During the referendum campaign, the battle lines have been drawn ever more sharply.
8 April 2016
We must bring strong and immediate pressure to bear on our negligent, treacherous government to maintain steelmaking in Britain.
It is plain that the capitalist world is in an absolute mess – and that another financial crisis is brewing.
On 23 June workers can use the referendum to strike the most important blow against capitalism in Britain in 70 years – voting to leave.
In the “war against terror”, British governments have wilfully ignored the best ways of fighting it. It won’t be defeated by smart missiles or drones. It won’t be defeated by toppling secular governments.
David Cameron has got his way, and the RAF is bombing Syria. We will all live to regret the despicable vote in parliament which saw the bombing authorised. MPs voted for invasion and death. Then they laughed.
23 November 2015
Cameron is planning to come back to parliament with a motion to authorise British bombing in Syria. In this he is backed by many Labour MPs and aided by the weak-willed hints from all parts of the shadow cabinet about a “free vote”.
Should British workers demand the right to working tax credits? The government’s push to reduce them is being greeted with howls of outrage from many.
The current crisis in steel is a perfect example of the debacle facing Britain as a whole. First we have a formerly nationalised industry being privatised, then inevitably finding its way into foreign hands.
The Cameron government wants to bomb Syria, as do all too many Tory and Labour MPs. But British intervention could only be part of NATO’s aim of ousting Syria’s government. We should have no part in it.
12 October 2015
The Cameron government wants to bomb Syria, and so do all too many Labour MPs. But any British intervention would inflame a very dangerous situation – tossing a laser-guided missile into what is already a powder keg.
The assumption that the national minimum wage was good for workers was always wrong.
In this issue we carry a number of articles about the dire position faced by young people in Britain today. They are scarcely out of the womb when the government’s testing regimes are applied to them.
It’s time to stop magical thinking, time to allow experience to conquer false hope.
8 July 2015
Pompously launched to the strains of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy at the start of 1991, the euro now stands revealed as a cage to trap and impoverish the peoples of Europe.
6 July 2015
Yet again, any opportunity to justify an attack on Syria is cynically used by the British government. The latest case is the vile terrorist murders on the beach in Tunisia.
We have said that the main danger of fascism in Britain comes from the heart of the establishment, parliament. If you doubt this, take a look at the Trade Union Bill announced in the Queen’s Speech.
After 7 May, what should workers do? We don’t have the luxury of just preparing for the next election, as the Labour party is doing – though it looks like it is seeing how to lose the next election too.
As capitalism continues its drive to reduce workers to utter penury and, worse, compliance in that drive, the number of workers on zero hours contracts has soared from 200,000 in 2010 to 1.8 million in 2015.
By the time you read this, the election will probably have morphed into a grand negotiation about a coalition. This they call politics.
Every year workers throughout the world celebrate May Day. Forty years ago, it coincided with the liberation of South Vietnam. This year, May Day comes hot on the heels of the US’s massive climbdown over Cuba – brilliant news.
The run-up to an election is a strange time. There is much talk of democracy while in reality a range of tactics is deployed to remove citizens from the electoral roll.
Ukraine (desperate for a ceasefire) – Russia, Germany and France concluded a peace agreement in Minsk on 12 February. Notably, the main warmongers – the US, Britain and the EU – were absent.
11 January 2015
The French people have responded magnificently to the fascists who killed the workers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January and in a Parisian grocery shop on 9 January.
Welcome to the first bimonthly Workers – 24 pages in full colour, replacing a 16-page monthly in black and white.
Estimates put the value of Britain’s housing stock at more than £5 trillion – that’s five thousand billion. Yet the shortage of housing remains a pressing requirement for millions of workers.
The EU is built on the “free movements” of capital, labour, goods and services, that is, on uncontrolled movements of all four. Capital needs these “freedoms” in order to maximise its profits, and for no other reason.
Parliament disgraced itself when it voted in October for another assault on stricken Iraq – “making the rubble bounce”, in the US Air Force’s unsavoury phrase.
