Social care provision for older or disabled people is at the forefront of government reforms. The government has this year started what it calls the "personalisation" of services.
The Scottish parliament brought in free personal care for over 65s in 2002 under a Labour administration.
The beginning of the 1980s saw the rise of the left wing inside the Labour Party behind the figure of Tony Benn.
A Labour Party that courts respectability while refusing to stand up for the working class, and trade union leaders that turn their backs on strikes to curry social peace with the bosses. Sound familiar? Well we’ve have been here before.
There’s an old saying that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Thirty years ago in Italy a political drama played out that justified such a saying – the kidnapping and killing of Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro.
"I could never understand why all those people were calling the BNP fascists. Well, I do now." Those were the words of Maureen Stowe, who was elected as a British National Party (BNP) councillor in Burnley in 2003 – but left the party a few months later after discovering the ugly truth about it.
Some people say we shouldn’t worry about the BNP because fascism "just isn’t part of the British character". But there is a long history of fascism in Britain. And the reason fascists have never triumphed is that they have been confronted, not ignored.
The defeat of the Labour government in 1951 led to a huge convulsion in the party.
Some 850 women sewing-machinsts at Ford Dagenham in east London struck against sex discrimination in their job grading on 7 June 1968.
Voters in Crewe & Nantwich humiliated New Labour last week by handing the Tories their first by-election win over Labour since 1982. The Crewe result followed that of the London and local elections on 1 May, which also saw the Tories giving Labour a drubbing.
London’s Heathrow airport is an ever-expanding city state that sucks in workers in the pursuit of profit. It is the world’s busiest international airport and it grows constantly with an accumulation of land, wealth and pollution for the sake of commerce.
Each expansion of the airport has come with a promise of no more. Each time it has been a lie.
