Where are jobs being lost? Every month there are fewer jobs. Between February and April job vacancies fell by 51,000 – or
17 February 1992 was a busy day for Mario Chiesa, the manager of a old people’s hospice in Milan. His second appointment that day was with a cleaning company boss who wanted to win the hospice contract.
You’re probably best known as a writer for Casualty and the musical drama Blackpool. Occupation is a long way from that. What made you decide to write a drama about British troops in Iraq?
Between 1970-3 Chile entered a period of revolution. Workers began to take control of factories, the peasants were seizing the land and a vast movement of the oppressed was making its mark on shaping a new society.
The image of a single defiant protester halting a convoy of tanks captured the imagination of millions of people around the world 20 years ago. This lone man facing down the immense power of the army has come to represent the Tiananmen Square uprising of June 1989. It shook China’s rulers to the core.
China didn’t just face a political crisis in 1989 – it was an economic one too. The Chinese economy grew massively throughout the 1980s, but increasingly it grew out of the control of China’s leaders.
The economic crisis has discredited the idea that the market is the solution to our problems.
In September 1940 a German Jewish refugee committed suicide after he fled occupied France into Spain and was then told he would be turned over to Hitler’s Gestapo.
Britain’s famous parliament building overlooks the Thames, its gothic permanence supposedly representing the timelessness of the "mother of all parliaments".
The history of the twentieth century in Britain has shown that whenever a Labour government in parliamentary office has found itself in conflict with the class wielding economic and industrial power, the government has been resisted, humiliated or defeated, usually all three.
Most politicians and journalists talk as though the only possible sort of democracy is parliament, so all we can do is patch up a decrepit system. The history of the socialist movement shows that there is a different tradition of democracy.
