Issue: 2234
Dated: 15 Jan 2011
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"There was a period of remorse and apology for banks—and I think that period needs to be over."
Predictions of famine and food riots are growing as the price of wheat spirals to its highest ever level.
Journalists at local newspapers across Britain are battling against a pay freeze and job cuts by their profiteering employer.
University and college lecturers across Britain could be out on strike on 23 March—budget day.
The Times Higher Educational Supplement (THES) ran an article last week highlighting what it called "splits" in the UCU lecturers’ union.
Teachers at Rawmarsh Community School in Rotherham struck for three days last week over job cuts. They were set to strike again on Wednesday and Thursday of this week.
OVER 100,000 teachers in the NUT union are this week being asked by the union if they are willing to strike to defend their pensions.
An Essex firefighter has been sacked on the spot—just for writing a letter to a local councillor about cuts to the fire service.
Some 800 fire and rescue staff in London began a ballot for strike last week.
Around 200 workers at GlaxoSmithKline in Coleford, Gloucestershire are to be balloted for strikes over pay.
Members of the Prospect, Unite and Unison unions at National Grid have voted massively in favour of industrial action after rejecting a below-inflation pay offer.
The bus workers Unite union has called a national work stoppage for all members on 1 March to highlight the long hours drivers work.
The United Left group in the Unite union held a national meeting in Birmingham last Saturday to discuss the best way to take the union forward.
Rubbish collection ground to a halt in parts of Britain in recent weeks because of the snow.
The Unison union did a terrible deal for workers at Blackpool council this week.
The proposed five day strike by 7,500 council workers in Kirklees, West Yorkshire, was called off after the Unison union reached an agreement with employers.
Britain’s biggest health service trade union has thrown out an attempt by employers to blackmail thousands of low paid NHS workers.
Fifteen hundred British Airways (BA) cabin crew packed into a union meeting at Kempton Park racecourse on Monday of this week.
There is a possibility of more strikes on London Underground after a key RMT transport union committee voted narrowly to calling 48-hours of action later this month.
More than 1,000 workers at Heinz’s Wigan factory this week rejected an improved pay offer and struck for their fourth 24-hour period.
Birmingham is becoming a festering trashheap as industrial action and snow has ground refuse collection to a near halt.
Well-heeled villagers from David Cameron’s Oxfordshire constituency were rudely awakened on Sunday morning last week as over 1,000 postal workers and their friends took to the streets of Witney.
Two upcoming student protests are a big opportunity to step up the pressure on the government.
Edward Woollard has been sentenced to two years and eight months in a youth detention centre. He is the student who dropped a fire extinguisher from the roof of Millbank Tower during protests on 10 November,
The racist English Defence League (EDL) plans to return to Luton, where it was formed in 2009, on Saturday 5 February. Anti‑fascists will resist it.
Michael Lyons, a 24-year old Royal Navy medic, is the latest member of the armed forces to officially object to the horror of the Afghan war.
The Tories want to snatch away a decent education from millions of working class children.
The Tories want to privatise the NHS. They will publish a new health bill on Monday of next week that will hand over up to 80 percent of the NHS budget to GPs.
David Cameron’s spin doctor Andrew Coulson is yet again embroiled in controversy over the News of the World’s phone-hacking.
Prisoners rioted at Littlehey young offenders’ unit in Cambridgeshire this week. It comes after a riot at Ford open prison two weeks ago.
The government is set to "replace" control orders this week—a form of detention without trial that restrict people’s freedom and include house arrest or curfews.
Former Labour MP David Chaytor was jailed for 18 months last week for fraudulently claiming more than £20,000 in expenses.
Fire bosses were renewing their threat to sack all 5,500 of London’s firefighters as Socialist Worker went to press.
An immigration operation led to 15 people at Guy’s and St Thomas Hospital in south London being arrested and charged for fraud and ID card offences on Thursday of last week.
UK Uncut and other activists are calling for protests against the government’s rise in VAT.
Students protesting over cuts stormed a branch of the RBS bank in Birmingham today, angry over news of bankers’ obscene bonuses.
Around 3,000 members of the PCS civil service workers’ union in seven call centres are to strike for two days next week after the collapse of intensive talks with Jobcentre Plus management. This is the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Unions have suspended two planned half-day strikes by some 480 bin workers that were due to start in Birmingham today.
Over 50 protesters came to the Right to Work initiated protest outside RBS headquarters this afternoon (Friday).
Revolution has ousted the corrupt Tunisian leader President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.
MPs will debate and vote on the abolition of the education maintenance allowance (EMA) in parliament on Wednesday 19 January.
Uprisings are shaking the authoritarian regimes of Tunisia and Algeria in North Africa.
The assassination of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer last week highlights the destabilising effect of the "war on terror".
David Hart, the man who did the dirtiest of Margaret Thatcher’s dirty work in the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, has finally died.
Leon Trotsky led the struggle against Joseph Stalin’s counter-revolution. This battle began in 1923, six years after the Russian Revolution.
Events of 100 years ago show that workers, often with no militant tradition and with the most cowardly union leaders, can suddenly explode into militant mass action.
One year on from the devastating earthquake, much of Haiti remains in ruins. Life for ordinary Haitians has got worse not better, even after all the promises of aid, the visits from legions of politicians and celebrities, and thousands of US soldiers and United Nations (UN) forces.
Romel Jean Pierre, 17 years old and a member of Ti Moun Rezistans, a collective in Port-au-Prince
Brazil heads the UN mission in Haiti. Haitians say that terrifying, unannounced and unexplained raids of their areas by Brazilian troops are common.
The annual conference of the Socialist Workers Party, which took place in London last weekend, was enthused by the excitement of the new student movement.
Conference agreed that mobilising resistance to the government’s cuts is a key task facing the SWP.
The upsurge of student struggle and resistance to the government means that the SWP has real possibilities to grow.
"The student demonstrations have been marked by visceral class anger and anti-Tory hatred," said Hannah Dee from the SWP central committee, opening the session on students.
The conference session on the SWP’s industrial work saw an important discussion over how to mobilise resistance in the unions.
The conference saw a series of votes on the party’s policies in the coming months.
The use of Islamophobic arguments by mainstream politicians has encouraged the growth of the far right in Britain.
Judith Orr, the new editor of Socialist Worker, introduced a session on imperialism.
In London during the 1970s radical squatters and artists came to see squatting as the new politics.
In a nailbiting new thriller a smugly successful middle class family are thrown into chaos when the wife is accused of her boss’s brutal murder.
This Hollywood movie tells how a multi-national group escaped from Joseph Stalin’s gulag and survived climatic extremes to walk 4,000 miles to political freedom in India.
This exhibition documents the Sidney Street Siege in east London—where Lithuanian anarchists had a raging gun battle with police in 1911.
A new weekly, live comedy current affairs show sounds promising with hosts Charlie Brooker, David Mitchell and Lauren Laverne.
Barry Norman explores how the experience of going to the cinema in Britain has changed over the past 100 years.
Jack Straw lent credibility to the barrage of racism in the press when he said that the grooming of young women for sex was, "a specific problem" among Pakistani men. He made the statement after two men were jailed at Nottingham crown court after being found guilty of sexual abuse and rape.
Few activists will be surprised at the news that undercover police officer Mark Kennedy infiltrated environmental groups in Britain, travelling abroad masquerading as a professional climber and campaigner.
East Lancashire SWP members, friends and fellow campaigners were shocked and saddened by the sudden death, after a stroke, of Ayeshah Jones on New Year's Day.
How protest drove Nazi out of our city centre We found out that British National Party (BNP) candidate Gary Tumulty was working at a local Spar shop here in Manchester, after his details and picture were published online.
‘You could even argue that the new system is not inconsistent with our principle, although there is a principle with which it is inconsistent, which is that we wanted to abolish them’