Brightest and best?
A focus on importing skilled labour denies skill here – and damages foreign countries…
Features
Features
Stop the EU war machine!
During the 2016 referendum those who warned that the EU was developing its own army were dismissed as fantasists. Instead, we were told the EU had kept the peace in Europe. The truth is totally different…
Small can be beautiful
Britain could take a world lead in a new nuclear technology, and boost its energy self-sufficiency too…
Keep Britain out of the Free Trade trap
Siren voices are telling us that we should be negotiating Free Trade Agreements with the US, with the EU, with just about anybody…
Coastal communities fight for a future
Brexit is an opportunity to revitalise Britain’s coastal communities, which have taken a beating after they were tricked into the EU Common Fisheries Policy in 1973.
Brexit - an opportunity to produce more food
Along with fishing, agriculture is set to be a big beneficiary of Britain’s leaving the EU. But that won’t happen without a collective determination to make it so…
Smoke and mirrors
Uber cabs, Uber economy, Uber employment – we’re deluged in disinformation about this business model…
Make energy independent
Energy has been hardest hit by the deluge of EU directives instructing us what we could do and how we could do it…
Gambling away people’s lives
Problem gambling is on the rise and there is little regulation to protect those caught up in this quintessentially capitalist addiction…
Revolution: which side are you on?
A century after the Bolshevik Revolution ushered in workers’ power, the lessons continue to reverberate around the world…
A long way from a believable future for rail
The government talks about having a strategy, but the reality is that overambitious forecasts are likely to leave services cut, and taxpayers and passengers picking up the bill…
No pay, no productivity
Stop all this talk about higher productivity being the route to higher pay. In fact, the reverse is true: only when pay rates rise will capitalists be forced to invest…
Guards battle still raging [shorter]
Disputes about staffing and pay are sweeping through the rail industry…
Grenfell: no control, no accountability
Tenants at Grenfell Tower could not have done more to attract attention to the risk of fire. But they were up against more than penny-pinching profiteers – a whole system had been designed to take control away from them…
On the march towards a European army
The current president of the European Commission wants it. So did his predecessors. And now the whole EU is taking steps towards the creation of a unified European military, along with unified defence research…
How politicians created a childcare crisis
What happens when the government introduces a childcare scheme but fails to fund it properly? Nurseries are closing, childminders are quitting – and parents and grandparents are picking up the bill…
Unions plan a future for British shipping
Trade unions involved in British shipping have set their minds to exploiting the opportunities that will open up when we leave the EU. In so doing, they are setting an example to the whole trade union movement…
They call it a housing market, but it’s just chaos
After Brexit, we must seize the opportunity to roll back privatisation, the market, and the free movement of labour and capital to rethink Britain’s housing…
Shh...don’t mention the class struggle
Suddenly, politicians seem to be wanting to talk about work. Low wage work, minimum wage work, gig work, any kind of work. Just as long as there’s no contradiction between employers and workers…
EU: making pain in Spain
The EU is standing to one side in the crisis over Catalonia. But the situation is also of its own making…
How market madness is throttling broadband
Britain could have led the world in fibre broadband. Instead, hostility to nationalised industries and blind faith in the market shut development down – and are still holding back the country’s productive forces…
Fight the fees? There’s no time like the present
Students facing a working lifetime of debt are up against the clock. They must use their time at university to demand the abolition of tuition fees – and force their vice-chancellors to join them in the fight…
Paying the price of the European Union
It’s become a mantra, endlessly repeated by the TUC: “Workers must not pay the price of Brexit.” What price would that be? And how about acknowledging the price of staying in the EU?
Migration and control
We’ve had a government policy paper over free movement. But we still need clarity…
At last - a strategy for shipbuilding
There was a time when the term “industrial strategy” would simply bring sneers from government. The vote to leave the EU has changed all that. The first clear product is a plan for Britain’s shipbuilding industry…
Government scraps electrification plans
Beset by EU-dictated cost rises, the transport secretary is cancelling a raft of plans to extend electrification across the rail network. The move has sparked fierce opposition, and not a little ridicule…
Research and division
British universities have been doing well out of EU funding – but at a cost for everyone else…
NHS pay battle falters
More and more staff at Barts Health are seeing the importance of protecting Agenda for Change rates…
Free movement? More a free ride for universities
Academics complain that their wages have been capped since 2008, and they’re right. But they don’t seem to be applying their collective intellect to working out why…