Two important campaigns — Stop the War and Defend Council Housing — have launched questionnaires aimed at election candidates.
IN 1794 a huge public meeting gathered in Sheffield, swelled by thousands of local metal workers. The words "liberty, brotherhood and equality" — touchstones of the recent French Revolution — hung in the air. The purpose of the mass meeting was to link two causes that burned deeply in the souls of the English working class — for the reform of the corrupt and undemocratic parliamentary system, and for the "total and unqualified abolition of Negro slavery".
As the election campaign gets under way one issue we have to address is the idea that a vote for Respect is a "wasted vote". These arguments can be summed up as, "I like what you say, I agree with you on the war, but you can’t win — and even if you win a seat, what impact can you have?"
The impending general election presents the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) with a great opportunity.
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government boasted that the poll tax, their new local government tax, would mean that "a duke would pay the same as a dustman".
Why did you leave your former job as British ambassador to Uzbekistan?
Thursday 7 AprilLaunch meeting of ASBO Concern, 7pm, Friends Meeting House, Euston Road, London (Euston station).
Remember how you felt when Tony Blair took us into the Iraq war, treating with contempt the majority of the population and the two million people who marched against it?
I discussed last week how Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper on the special theory of relativity helped resolve an emerging crisis in physics. In the same year Einstein published three other major scientific papers.
Over the next five years New Labour plans another massive handover of public services to big business — striking at the heart of comprehensive education. Under the city academies programme private sponsors are to get their hands on 200 schools by 2010.
Academies, as private companies, are wholly removed from any local democratic control.
Activists were campaigning for Respect up and down England and Wales even before the general election was announced on Tuesday this week.
