Britain Follow

The British working class movement experienced some of its darkest days in the 1930s. It had suffered three major blows to its confidence and organisation – the defeat of the 1926 General Strike, the collapse in 1931 of the second Labour government and the impact of the world economic slump that began in 1929.

A group of exiled islanders who were forcibly removed from their homes by the British government won a victory in the high court last week.

The arguments about why the Nazi British National Party (BNP) won 11 seats in the borough of Barking & Dagenham, east London, in the recent council elections continued to rage last week.

The government has stolen £52 a week from every pensioner in Britain – and now they expect us to be grateful when they give back £1.40 and also put up the pension age for every worker!

The British occupying forces in Basra have all but lost control of the southern Iraqi city. Last weekend saw two more soldiers killed in a roadside bomb attack, bringing the total number of British fatalities in Iraq to 111.

A single British company produced more carbon dioxide last year than all of Croatia. Eon UK, which owns Powergen, is Britain’s biggest corporate emitter of greenhouse gases. Last year it produced 27 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Just days before the government publishes its White Paper on pension reform, Britain’s biggest pensioner organisation – the National Pensioners Convention (NPC) – opened its annual Pensioners’ Parliament.

The NPC has just published its second annual Age Audit of life for older people in Britain.

Israel has abandoned any pretence of being interested in peace with the Palestinian people. It is using all its force – its US-supplied tanks, weapons and fighter jets – to crush a people's resistance. Israel has inflicted decades of repression, brutality and humiliation on the Palestinian people.

The high court last week ruled that the British government is not obliged to intervene on behalf of the British residents held at Guantanamo Bay.

What many of us feared became a reality on the night of 4 May, when the fascist British National Party (BNP) won 32 council seats, 11 of them in Barking & Dagenham. They now have 48 councillors around the country.

Anger at Britain’s occupation of southern Iraq is growing, with Iraqis demanding that British troops halt all low level flights over neighbourhoods and withdraw all troops from the cities.