London's building, but who's building it?
[WORKERS, DEC 2006]
Any city has to have a dynamic existence that enables its people to live: be housed; travel; work; obtain healthcare; partake of leisure and trade. London, existing for 2000 years – bombed, burnt and ravaged by disease – has been one of the most successful in rebuilding and regenerating itself through the skills of its citizens.
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Blair at his lowest ebb as Bush fades – and the war gets worse
[WORKERS, DEC 2006]
As the neo-conservative project finally dies in the USA, Tony Blair and his government are left stranded. The recognition that the war against Iraq is lost plus the overwhelming hostility of the US people to the war, shown in the electoral defeat for Bush in the midterm elections, has forced the US government to look for face-saving ways to get out of the mess it has created in Iraq.
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The eco warriors have gone – and Drax carries on making itself cleaner
[WORKERS, DEC 2006]
The dust has settled on this summer's eco protest at Drax power station in North Yorkshire (see October issue) The "action camp" has moved on, the police have resumed other duties and the media crews are busy elsewhere. But the argument remains; the debate will not go away. At its heart lies the question – does electricity production on such a large scale pose an insurmountable threat to our future?
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Why is Ireland now bowing to the EU?
[WORKERS, DEC 2006]
It is 25 years since the northern Ireland Hunger Strikes ended, on 3 October 1981. This anniversary is a good time to reflect upon the many changes that have taken place in the politics of Ireland since then.
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They were wrong. We were right.
[WORKERS, DEC 2006]
This is one of the best books on the war against Iraq. Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post's senior Pentagon correspondent, argues that the invasion has been the worst US foreign policy decision ever. With 655,000 Iraqis killed, more than 2,810 US troops dead and more than 21,600 seriously wounded, the occupation of Iraq is a disaster.
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Battleground NHS: the challenge for the working class
[WORKERS, NOV 2006]
Under the banner of reform, the government is pursuing more and more frantically its unpopular, tired old agenda for the health service, already shown to fail in other public services.
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Can foreign policy be ethical?
[WORKERS, NOV 2006]
The late Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary in the 1997 Labour government, promised an "ethical foreign policy", raising a few wry smiles. Nine years later it sounds like a sick joke. Britain is involved in military adventures across the globe and has effectively subcontracted its foreign policy to the US.
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Academies: who's sponsoring whom?
[WORKERS, NOV 2006]
Anyone who imagines there is any such thing as a "free" market ideology being promoted in education by government needs to look at its current plans for schools. There never has been anything free about the market. It's about capitalism pushing through its agenda, exercising its power. At present it is doing that courtesy of the Labour government in a most brutal fashion, and it is meeting minimal opposition either from within its own party ranks or from workers. For education, education, education read profits, profits, profits.
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Blair's (seventy) billions for the consultants
[WORKERS, NOV 2006]
David Craig, a management consultant with 20 years' experience, has written an outstanding book together with Richard Brooks, a tax inspector for 16 years and now a journalist with Private Eye. They show how the Blair government helps consultants to loot and wreck our public services and take our hard-earned tax money. This relationship is increasingly corrupt, as the authors show in their detailed account of the government's relations with accountancy firm Arthur Andersen.
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Let's have a working class debate on immigration
[WORKERS, OCT 2006]
The government forecast that there would be 15,000 immigrants from Eastern Europe in the year after their entry to the European Union on 1 January 2004. The actual number was 300,000, followed by another 300,000 in 2005. Due to the increased supply of labour, wages in several unskilled and low-skilled job sectors have fallen, hitting the indigenous working class. The extra demand for housing has forced prices and rents ever higher, and in many cities students now find it almost impossible to get part-time jobs to help them through college.
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The great water robbery
[WORKERS, OCT 2006]
Water companies in Britain are robbing the people, depriving them of the use of water, polluting it, and failing to provide security of supply for the future. They are losing 3.6 billion litres every day through leaks. In 2001, Thames Water lost 181 million gallons a day; it is now losing even more – 241 million gallons a day, 30 per cent of its water. It is imposing hosepipe bans on 14 million homes, and threatening standpipes next year, having just avoided one this summer.
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GM - science for development
[WORKERS, OCT 2006]
As part of the annual Brighton festival this summer the local Institute for Development Studies (IDS), based at Sussex University, staged a lecture about the need to "democratise" genetic modification (GM) technologies, so as to ensure the differing needs of farmers in different regions of the world are given priority over the extraction of profit through capitalist ownership and control of the technology.
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Britain's imperial obsession with Afghanistan
[WORKERS, OCT 2006]
The Victorian British ruling class regarded India as the jewel in the crown of the Empire, to be guarded at all costs. The dangerous rival was Russia and the weak frontier was Afghanistan. Subjection of the Afghans was therefore a prime objective of the British government in India. Friendship with them proved difficult, however, as they were a group of fighting tribes who had lived for centuries despoiling the traders through the Khyber Pass.
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What next for trade unions?
[WORKERS, SEPT 2006]
As workers we mostly act as if we are nothing to do with trade unions, which as everyone knows are declining in numbers and influence. But they shape what we are – as a class and as a people we rely on large numbers of us being organised. We ignore their decline at our peril. We need to look at how our organisations are distinctive, what's gone wrong with them and what it is about them we cannot afford to be without.
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Political statement: The future is ours
[WORKERS, SEPT 2006]
At the previous congress the Party laid out an analysis of the state of Britain and the class which has been utterly borne out by events. The questions for us to consider now are: Where do we go from here? What has changed? How do we strike out for a future?
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Equal value spells an end to collectivism
[WORKERS, SEPT 2006]
An Employment Tribunal recently ordered the GMB union to pay around £1 million in compensation to some women members employed by Middlesbrough Council. How did this come about and what are the consequences?
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The crisis of socialism
[WORKERS, SEPT 2006]
Randhir Singh is the retired Professor of Political Theory at the University of Delhi, India. As a Marxist scholar who has been actively involved in political affairs, he has devoted this book to a full exposition of the nature and history of socialism from Marx and Engels to the present time,
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The illegal war continues
[WORKERS, JULY 2006]
In the face of increasing losses on the ground in Iraq and opposition to the war at home, the Bush and Blair governments are stepping up their campaign of misinformation.
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Victories and challenges as academics ponder pay offer
[WORKERS, JULY 2006]
The protracted pay campaign in the universities which began last summer and escalated into an industrial dispute three months ago with a national one-day strike followed by a boycott of exam marking, finished its first phase on 6 June.
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With the Maoists in Nepal
[WORKERS, JULY 2006]
As the Nepalese people's struggle against the autocratic feudal monarchy to establish a democratic republic hit a high point during the month of April, volunteers arrived to help build a 91-kilometre stretch of road known as the Martyrs Road. The Second International Road Building Brigade, drawing its members from Afghanistan, Iran, Scotland and England, gathered with the aim of journeying to Rolpa during April to work on this road.
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Communism – I'm lovin' it
[WORKERS, JULY 2006]
In the tourist centre of Prague, just off Wenceslas Square with its moneychangers and trinket stalls, the Museum of Communism is to be found. Though not found easily. On a sombre poster Joseph Stalin points the way, between the rather more garish McDonald's and a Black Light theatre, through the arch to the Casino in the Palace Savarin. Having ascended red-carpeted stairs the tourist must make a choice (that's democracy for you); either right to the casino or left for the museum.
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Industry on the Tyne - employers turn to eastern Europe
[WORKERS, JUNE 2006]
We are constantly told that immigration from eastern Europe contributes to our economy and provides much needed labour for our hospitality and catering industries. But the direct experience of the European Union's free movement of labour on manufacturing jobs in the northeast of England shows a very different story. It is a story of the deliberate destruction of manufacturing jobs in Britain dating back to the time of Thatcher and continued by Blair.
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Away with all our superstitions!
[WORKERS, JUNE 2006]
The British version of the Communist anthem the Internationale is unique. The original French simply says "Make a clean sweep of the past", and so, more or less, do other versions. The fight against superstition, against unreason, is more deeply rooted in Britain and its history than in any other country.
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Dirty money: capital just can't keep its hands clean
[WORKERS, JUNE 2006]
Capitalism's Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System, by Raymond W. Baker, hardback, 438 pages, ISBN 047164488-9, John Wiley & Sons, 2005, £16.99.
This is a fascinating and deeply researched book by a businessman with experience across the world. Baker sums up, "Dirty money causes disaster for millions and deprivation for billions. No other economic condition generates so much harm for so many people. A system that continues to support such massive illegal flows, sustaining poverty, and contributing to historically high levels of global inequality, requires fundamental rethinking."
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Academics' fight continues
[WORKERS, JUNE 2006]
The dispute in Britain's universities is entering an intense stage, with the employers seeking to sow division at every opportunity by focusing on whip-ping up student and parent opposition to the dispute rather than negotiating with the unions. The employers are also seeking to sow division between academic and administrative unions by falsely claiming that Unison is satisfied with the pay offer to administrators.
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Pensions: bringing capital to heel
[WORKERS, MAY 2006]
Blair and Brown's announcement at the beginning of April that they have a workers' consensus to go backwards to retirement at age 68 was little more than a show by paper tigers. The pensions day of action the week before had already put the lie to that, making the Turner Report's proposals of late retirement and the further privatisation of state pension benefits redundant. Very few workers are now taking seriously the arguments about living longer, dependency ratios and other such nonsense.
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With friends like these, who needs enemies?
[WORKERS, MAY 2006]
Three years after the invasion of Iraq, with no end in sight to the resistance against the occupiers or to the opposition at home, how has Blair managed to manipulate opposition within his party and within trade unions? How has he managed to make a major foreign policy speech en-dorsing all of the worst features of the so-called US neo-cons and get away with it?
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How friends became killers
[WORKERS, MAY 2006]
There have been a number of reviews of Shooting Dogs, the film starring John Hurt which depicts the events of the Rwandan massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in 1994, and shot on location in Kigali using locals as extras. Some, such as the Guardian reviewer, have described the film as a work of fiction, while most others have praised it.
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Local government pensions: the battle starts
[WORKERS, MAY 2006]
Sir Sandy Bruce Lockhart, leader of the employers' side of the Local Government Association in the pensions dispute, began the recent struggle as a humble knight and has since been promoted to a lord. This is something akin to the promotion of a German officer after fighting a losing battle on the Russian front in 1942.
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Out in force in east London
[WORKERS, MAY 2006]
Council workers in east London borough Tower Hamlets came out in force on the March 28th strike to protect their pensions. In an unprecedented show of unity, workers in Unison, GMB, TGWU, NUJ and NUT joined picket lines around the borough, then met to hear each other's news in a local rally before travelling to Westminster to the London-wide strike rally.
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Slobodan Milosevic and the International War Crimes Tribunal
[WORKERS, MAY 2006]
The newspapers certainly had a field day with the death of Slobodan Milosevic. The Daily Telegraph, as usual in the vanguard of reaction, celebrated with malicious glee the demise of the man who they claim "achieved the break-up of Yugoslavia, the ruin of Serbia and the slaughter of hundreds and thousands of people". All were quick to remind us that Milosevic was the man the Americans called "the Butcher of the Balkans" as if that was all we needed to know about him and that, by repeating it often enough and shouting it loudly enough, it would obviously make it so.
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Welcome to the global water market (and you thought it was a basic right...)
[WORKERS, APR 2006]
They say it's not raining enough, and that we need meters. But what Britain really needs is something entirely different: a National Water Grid, to get rainfall from the wetter West to the drier East. And we need to keep control away from Brussels.
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Pensions and the future of public services
[WORKERS, APR 2006]
THE STRUGGLE is on to protect the local government pension scheme. On average 82% of members voting in the ballot for industrial action have supported action, with 28 March set to be a strike day. The significance has been recognised by the membership of the national trade unions with members in the scheme which have campaigned successfully for the vote. This must be the first step to defending pension schemes.
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The rise and rise of state power
[WORKERS, APR 2006]
Ever since the Labour government's draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1976, successive governments have increased their power over us in the name of fighting terrorism. These emergency measures have facilitated torture and other ill-treatment, unfair trials and loss of liberties.
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Who is running the WHO?
[WORKERS, APR 2006]
Not many people will have heard of Yves Beigbeder. In 2004 he wrote a remarkable book, International Public Health: Patients' Rights versus the Protection of Patents. What was perhaps most remarkable about it (apart from its price at £47.50!) is how someone who worked for many years as senior international civil servant was prepared to write with such candour on the workings of the international health services.
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Nuclear energy: grasping the nettle
[WORKERS, MAR 2006]
THE DECISION by a major engineering union to call for new nuclear generators in Britain will give much needed impetus to the presently hollow debate on energy. The assertion by Amicus last month that we are as little as five years away from an energy crisis may have ruffled a few feathers, but it remains virtually unchallenged within the industry. The question is, what can be done?
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War fever is back
[WORKERS, MAR 2006]
There is a great and growing danger of a wider war in the Middle East, drawing in more and more countries. Chaos is increasing in Iraq and Afghanistan and tension is rising in Iran, Syria and Lebanon. Israel is intensifying its occupation and bantustanisation (from the extreme form of the ideology of ethnic racism found in the old apartheid South Africa) of Palestine.
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Nurse, can you write me a prescription?
[WORKERS, MAR 2006]
You don't get to hear about a change until it is already way down the line. So it may come as a surprise when you first encounter a nurse, not a doctor, writing out your prescription. In fact nurses have been training as extended formulary nurse prescribers since 2002 and as supplementary prescribers since 2003.
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Why the European Union is bad for Britain
[WORKERS, MAR 2006]
Increasingly, British workers are recognising that the EU is damaging their interests, blocking any possible gains for workers and their trade unions in any EU state. So it is timely that this highly readable and well researched analysis is now available, providing extensive and rigorous evidence. It is essential reading that undoubtedly will assist in the process of moving workers from dissatisfaction to outright, conscious opposition, demanding withdrawal from the EU.
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Battle lines drawn in local government pension war
[WORKERS, MAR 2006]
The ballot for industrial action among the nearly 4 million members of the Local Government Pension Scheme began on 20 February. The first provisional national stoppage is scheduled for 28 March.
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The EU, Ukraine – and Latin America...
[WORKERS, FEB 2006]
What have recent events in Ukraine got to do with us as British workers? They are the latest in a long line of interventions and subversions of Eastern European countries to make them bend to the will of the US and EU. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Austria and Finland no longer felt their "neutrality" mattered any more and joined the EU though not NATO. There then followed a pattern of events across the countries of the former socialist bloc designed to incorporate them into what is increasingly looking like a Free Trade Area of Europe.
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The Free Trade Area of the Americas: RIP
[WORKERS, FEB 2006]
There was a good decision by the TUC conference last September to oppose the EU constitution. The conference should be congratulated. There was also a successful resolution supporting the new government of Venezuela. But Venezuela is at the heart of the fight against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the US attempt to do in the American continent what the US and the EU are doing in Europe.
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Death comes alive: the end of the afterlife
[WORKERS, FEB 2006]
One of the most important native English heresies was the idea that when a person died that was it, they died. Or in a milder form, their soul slept until humanity arose from the condition of exploitation. Either way, the English tradition of appreciating that all things die was profoundly revolutionary, and always linked to the struggle for social change, science and culture.
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The interest rate con trick: laughing all the way to the banks
[WORKERS, FEB 2006]
Changes in the rates of interest are often portrayed as part of the decision-making role of the Bank of England. Over the past 8 years or more, the Bank's committee has given the impression that in making 0.25% adjustments hither and thither, it has among other things successfully prevented a mortgage debt meltdown. The image is one of a firm hand on the tiller for the benefit of consumers.
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Local government pensions ballot looms
[WORKERS, FEB 2006]
Members of trade unions in the Local Government Pension Scheme will be balloting for industrial action from the first week in February. The ballot is primarily against the government's proposal to scrap the benefit of the "rule of 85", which allows employees over 60 to retire if their age and length of service added together amount to 85 or more (see Workers, January 2006).
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Just say No to the attack on the NHS
[WORKERS, JAN 2006]
As 2006 begins many people inside and outside the NHS are asking three questions: What is the real state of the NHS, how did it get to be like this and what can we do about it?
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Breaking through the myth of the 'pensions crisis'
[WORKERS, JAN 2006]
Pensions have now become firmly placed at the top of the trade union agenda, but not in the usual way of seeking improvements. This time it is to defend them from attacks by both employers and the government. Many, including some trade unionists, have been willing to accept the myth of a "pensions crisis" caused by people living longer and the lowering of the birth rate. Surely in a modern society we should be welcoming the fact that people are living longer, and population projections taking this into account have always been used to calculate the basis for our pension schemes.
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Reform of children's services – the thin end of a rather nasty wedge
[WORKERS, JAN 2006]
In July 2003 the government announced 35 pathfinder children's trusts supposedly to develop better integrated services for children and families in the light of the Victoria Climbié enquiry. However, amid the rhetoric of working together for children and young people the unions' experience to date with these pathfinders highlights some worrying trends for workers in local government, health and education.
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War and crumbs – Brown's statement
[WORKERS, JAN 2006]
You can't predict how dice will fall. The Chancellor gets berated for getting his forecasts wrong in an anarchic and unpredictable capitalist casino economy, but gets away with funding war and EU waste while throwing a few meagre crumbs to the deserving poor.
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In praise of the Reformation
[WORKERS, JAN 2006]
The Reformation in Britain was largely created by the ordinary people of Britain, those who had developed a strong dislike for the Church's pomp, ceremony, fasting and holy days, its cults of saints and veneration of images and relics, and its beliefs in ghosts, angels and demons. Having less emotional and financial investment in the old order than did the clergy and the landed class, they saw through the mysteries, signs and wonders of the Church, and its obsessions with Dooms and Last Days.
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