Issue: 2236
Dated: 29 Jan 2011
Search below by year or month.
Try our search to find a specific issue of Socialist Worker, or use the search at the top of the page to find a specific article.
Students have led the fightback against the Tory coalition. Thousands of young people have poured onto the streets to battle student fees and cuts.
Striking Rotherham teachers are stepping up their fight against job cuts at the end of three further days on strike this week.
Thousands of people remain on the streets of towns and cities in Egypt after a day of huge demonstrations calling for the downfall of the dictator Hosni Mubarak and his regime.
Thousands of university, college and school students – joined by workers – are marching in London and Manchester against Tory cuts to education, fee rises and attacks on jobs and services.
In both London and Manchester student marches have diverged from their planned routes—one march has gone to join protesters outside the Egyptian embassy, while a breakaway from the other has occupied a branch of Barclays bank.
Egyptian socialist Wassim Wagdy spoke about what the revolution in Egypt means on a protest outside the Egyptian embassy in London, 28 January 2011
On Saturday 5 February, the racist English Defence League (EDL) is going back to where it all began for the group—Luton.
Sian Timoney is a Labour councillor in Luton’s Farley ward, where the EDL is planning to assemble on 5 February. She spoke to Socialist Worker.
Can we beat the state with non-violent methods? This is the question that emerges in many mass movements and has come up most recently during the student protests and the Tunisian revolt.
Workers at Great Western Ambulance Service in Bristol, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and parts of Somerset say they will begin industrial action on Thursday of this week.
Bosses at South East Coast Ambulance Service are demanding workers accept a 25 percent pay cut, or the loss of 30 jobs.
Mirfat Badallah’s campaign to stop her deportation to Yemen is growing. Last week she sent 28 letters of support to the Home Office. She urgently needs more solidarity.
Refugee and migrant workers’ groups held a meeting in central London last Saturday following a series of horrendous immigration raids on workplaces in which workers have been arrested and deported.
Some 250 workers at Perkins Engines in Stafford, West Midlands, struck on Tuesday of last week and were set to come out again on Thursday this week.
Over 100 North Shields factory workers struck last Saturday over pay.
British Airways (BA) cabin crew last week voted by a fantastic 78.5 percent for strikes on a 75 percent turnout. This is a bigger vote than in their last ballot.
Dan Hazelton, his brother Tom, Peter Johnson, and Adam Taylor died at work last week in Great Yarmouth.
The National Union of Teachers is seeking the earliest possible timetable for co-ordinated industrial action to defend pensions.
The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) has announced that it is preparing to ballot members for a national strike over the government’s plans to increase teachers pensions contributions. If it goes ahead, it will be the first time the ATL has struck since 1979.
Ballots for strikes will begin next week in the lecturers’ UCU union on jobs, pay and pensions.
Up to 1,000 postal workers and their supporters joined a march and rally in Kingston, south west London, against the privatisation of Royal Mail last Saturday.
The TUC is calling for a quarter of a million trade unionists to take to the streets of London and march against the government’s brutal cuts on Saturday 26 March.
Hundreds of anti-cuts activists, trade unionists, pensioners and students are signed up to the People’s Convention on 12 February.
The jobs massacre is growing every day.
Driving Standards Agency (DSA) bosses have been planning to close the agency’s Cardiff office—and move on to shut its Newcastle one.
A solid strike by 3,000 call centre workers on Thursday and Friday of last week highlighted their horrendous working conditions.
A gathering of several hundred trade union militants and socialists voted to launch another national campaign against the cuts last weekend.
Over 50 local people and health workers attended a meeting called to defend the NHS on Tuesday of last week in Waltham Forest.
Bin workers in Birmingham are furious as they have discovered that council managers have reneged on a deal reached last week.
The legal right to strike received another blow last week as a High Court judge granted an injunction on petty technicalities to halt a 48-hour strike by Docklands Light Railway (DLR) workers in London.
The Tories have found a new way to help their boss friends profit from ordinary people’s misery.
David Cameron’s spin‑doctor Andy Coulson quit last week over phone-hacking at the News of the World.
The global super-rich gathered in London last week to celebrate the opening of One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge.
"Scottish justice has notched up another political miscarriage of justice alongside that of Al Megrahi and Muir of Huntershill"
It was a case of deja vu as warmonger Tony Blair put in his second appearance at the Iraq inquiry last Friday.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) met last Saturday to discuss May’s council elections.
"I remember in September 1985, two things happened. One was someone showed me the front page of the Socialist Worker, with an article quoting a EEPTU branch official from Southampton talking about his worries about a recruiting office opening there with hundreds of people coming down to Wapping.
They said they would be there, and they were. The 25 January was declared a "Day of Anger" by democratic and socialist forces a week beforehand. The significance of the choice of date cannot be overestimated—it is "Police Day— an occasion when the regime incessantly drums up the virtues of its patriotic police force.
Secret documents reveal that Palestinian negotiators were prepared to offer Israel almost anything to get something they could call a state. Despite this surrender, Israeli negotiators still refused an agreement.
Waves of anger generated by the Tunisian revolution continue to crash against the country’s battered ruling class.
Tunisian socialist Mohammed told Socialist Worker that his mother Sadiha and his aunt Khwala went to greet the "Liberation Caravan".
The Tunisian revolution has given confidence to people everywhere to resist:
Official politics in Ireland descended into chaos in the last week.
Political and sectarian tensions in Lebanon are at the fore once more. On Tuesday, the Hizbollah-backed candidate for prime minister, Najib Mikati, was appointed. Anti-Hizbollah demonstrations broke out in the north of the country as the appointement was announced.
Socialists in Greece are leading the fight against the government’s austerity programme and attempts to blame immigrants for the crisis. As part of this racist scapegoating, fascists had taken over parts of the Agios Panteleimonos area of Athens and attacked immigrants.
A referendum has taken place in the south of the African country of Sudan to ask people whether they want to form a separate state.
Mass protests took over the streets of Egypt yesterday—in Alexandria, Suez, the capital Cairo and other parts of the country.
The importance of the victory of the Tunisian masses is not limited to the successful overthrow of Ben-Ali, ending 23 years of dictatorship. The Tunisian Revolution refutes the arguments that had been disseminated by many right-wing intellectuals over the past few decades that the Arab masses are incapable of achieving revolutionary change, and that the times of revolution are over.
Part of my family was wiped out for the crime of being Jewish in what has become known as the Holocaust. The German Nazi regime strove to create a racially pure, authoritarian society where dissent or difference was not to be tolerated.
The public library service is in crisis. The government’s slash-and-burn approach means a 28 percent cut in spending on them.
The Tunisian revolution has dramatically interrupted what passes for normality in the Arab world. Despite huge economic inequality, the hated domination of US imperialism, and the occasional assassination, the region suffers from astonishing political stagnation.
"No parents with a talented boy should feel that Eton is necessarily beyond their means."
Paul Foot, who went to Shrewsbury public school, once wrote, "The main characteristic of the school I went to was barbarism."
Eton was advertising for a pantry assistant earlier this month—offering £10,483 per year for a 40-hour week.
‘The Tories want to poison the NHS.’ Karen Reissmann, community psychiatric nurse and Unison health executive member
Woody Guthrie is often known as the father of protest songs. He was a massive influence on musicians such as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting from Black Swan. I knew it had been likened to The Red Shoes from 1948.
John McGill likes to learn, but as he advances to secondary school he realises that the system has already written him off because of his poor background.
The spectacular 45‑piece orchestra present a programme of traditional Roma and traveller music from Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Poet and former US soldier Brian Turner faces the traumatic aftermath of war in this new collection.
When the price of a loaf of bread starts to become the subject of conversations at work it’s a terrible sign of the times—hard times.
The bombing of Russia’s Domodedovo airport in Moscow, which saw at least 35 people killed and more than 100 injured, was blamed on "Islamic terrorists" from the Caucasus region.
New Cross Fire deaths that led to a revolt against racism Thirty years ago last week, on 18 January 1981, a fire in New Cross, south east London, killed 13 young black people during a birthday party.
‘Somebody better get down there and explain offside to her’