The Countryside Alliance will be marching through London on Sunday. March organisers say they are standing up to "unite rural Britain, for liberty, and for all those whose jobs are based in the country". In fact those at the centre of the Countryside Alliance and the march represent some of the richest and most reactionary people in Britain. Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith will be there, and Britain's richest landowners are backing the march.
BLAIR: Bush's poodle, chief warmonger in Europe PUTIN: butcher of Chechnya, linked to gangster capitalists JIANG ZEMIN: Chinese leader thanks to the bloodshed of Tiananmen Square CHIRAC: wants to make money from blood spilt for oil
War may have been at the centre of the debates that rocked the TUC congress, but it was far from being the only issue where unions and the government seemed set on a collision course. The prospect of the first national firefighters' strike for 25 years, anti-union laws, and attacks on workers' pensions all surfaced on the first day of the conference.
AWARD-WINNING campaigning journalist Paul Foot has been selected as the Socialist Alliance candidate in October's election for mayor of Hackney in east London. Voting begins on Monday 7 October, in three weeks time. His campaign has already attracted national media attention. Socialist Worker spoke to Paul Foot.
THE POLITICAL temperature has rocketed in recent weeks. There is the potential for the coming together of mass opposition to the war on Iraq and a very important industrial battle in the fire service. A senior Labour MP said last week, "I don't know about regime change in Iraq, but we certainly need regime change in Downing Street."
"THIS WHOLE affair has nothing to do with a threat from Iraq - there isn't one. It has nothing to do with the war against terrorism or with morality. Saddam Hussein is obviously an evil man, but when we were selling arms to him to keep the Iranians in check he was the same evil man he is today. In the same way he served Western interests then, he is now the distraction for the sleight of hand to protect the West's supply of oil. Under the cover of the war on terrorism, the war to secure oil supplies could be waged." That was the case argued by Mo Mowlam last week. Mowlam was for four years a New Labour cabinet minister - and the most popular one. Her attack on Bush and Blair's war pl
THE MURDER of an Iranian refugee in Sunderland two weeks ago has shocked many local people. Peiman Bahmani was stabbed in the street he lived in at 3.40pm. He died later in hospital. A man has been charged with murder and racially aggravated assault. The tragedy shows what happens when the Nazis gain a foothold in an area by whipping up racism, and provide a false focus for ordinary people's frustration and discontent.
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The biggest anti-racist event in the north of England for two decades struck a major blow against the Nazi British National Party at the weekend. Some 30,000 people joined the day-long Anti Nazi League "Love Music-Hate Racism" carnival in Manchester on Sunday.
TONY BLAIR claimed to be leading the world on tackling poverty and environmental destruction at the Earth Summit this week. The truth is that the summit's outcome represents no progress at all. On key areas it will guarantee things get worse, not better. That is why 25,000 protesters, mainly the poor of South Africa, defied the police and government and staged an angry march on the summit last Saturday (see report below).
AN IMPORTANT new study has blown a hole through the central ideas behind New Labour's welfare "reform". The study is called Poverty and the Welfare State: Dispelling the Myths by social policy expert Paul Spicker. It is published by the "think-tank" Catalyst, whose members include Labour's former deputy leader Roy Hattersley.
