Issues Follow Follow

NEVER IN recent times has the gulf between a government and the people been so wide. Tony Blair marches to war while the vast majority resolutely oppose him. Saturday's demonstration shows that huge numbers of people are prepared to actively oppose the government's war plans.

TONY BLAIR is not only kowtowing to US power in acting as George Bush's poodle. Britain's rulers have their own interests in dominating the Middle East and ensuring that "rogue states" do not threaten the profits of multinational corporations. BP - one of the world's biggest oil companies - is British owned. Half of another, Shell, is British.

THE ANNUAL conference of the NATO military alliance has for 40 years been an occasion for mutual backslapping and bland statements by leaders of the Western powers.

FOR WE who live on this planet under capitalism, there is the daily drip, drip, drip of frustration and resentment. And then, with eerie regularity, there are the horrors of famine, plague and war. The horrors have their roots in the daily apparatus of pedestrian human suffering. Thirty years ago I became a socialist and a revolutionary. Two things drove me to it.

THOUGHTFUL bureaucrats at the United Nations ensured that nothing would embarrass US Secretary of State Colin Powell last week. While Powell was giving his speech UN officials covered up a tapestry of one of the most famous murals in the world-Picasso's Guernica - because it shows the reality of war.

WE NEED to identify what "Empire" means. Does it mean the US government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that? In many countries Empire has sprouted other subsidiary heads, some dangerous by-products-nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course, terrorism.

THE US and British governments churned out a barrage of claims to justify war over the last week. US Secretary of State Colin Powell marshalled his case speaking to the United Nations. The British government produced yet another dossier. Barely had Powell finished speaking and the British document been published before much of their "evidence" fell apart.

"IN THE hours immediately following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld asked for plans to be drawn up for an American assault on Iraq. The following day, in a cabinet meeting at the White House, Rumsfeld again insisted that Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism".

BLAIR'S PLAN to cut the number of asylum seekers is shocking. One way the government justifies its plans is to say children's education suffers if they are taught with children who don't speak English. I am a parent governor at my daughter Sorcha's school, in a very deprived area of central London.

DAMON ALBARN, lead singer of the band Blur, explained to Socialist Worker why he supports the Stop the War Coalition.

£22,691 a year. Many workers in Britain dream of getting that amount. That was the amount of the pay rise awarded to Tony Blair's friend, the Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine, last week. Public outrage forced Irvine to put it on hold.

Parliament is not nearly democratic enough. We need a revolution to get genuine control, writes Paul Foot