Britain Follow

"I COULD never understand why all those people were calling the BNP fascists. Well I do now," says Maureen Stowe. She has broken all links with the British National Party and is now backing the fight against the fascists.

"THIS NEW video will be an excellent resource for people to use in Stop the War meetings," says school student and anti-war activist Ed Cope from Cambridge. "The makers of this film have managed to bring together material from leading members of the anti-war movement. It slots together interviews with footage from British news and Al Jazeera and film from the Vietnam War. "The nasty face of US and British imperialism is portrayed with powerful images. Nothing is more disturbing than the images from Iraq-the scalps of children in pools of blood, burnt bodies in crushed cars and men being thrust to the ground by soldiers, with plastic sacks over their heads and their hands bound behind

LONDON'S ASTORIA club rocked last week with 2,000 people determined to beat the British National Party. The event was the London launch of the new Unite Against Fascism coalition. It is campaigning against the British National Party, which is targeting the elections on 10 June. Both the audience and those on stage marked this out as no ordinary political meeting.

"WE WERE behaving like a proper trade union." Such comments came from university lecturers' picket lines across Britain and Northern Ireland last week. The pickets behaved exactly as any other group of trade unionists on strike-making up ditties about overpaid bosses, persuading people not to cross their picket lines, and generally hitting "production" in the workplace. But, of course, these are academics-tutors, researchers, course coordinators, thinkers.

THE FOUR newspaper barons on this page want to whip up fear and hysteria over migrants coming to Britain. They brand migrants as "scroungers" and "benefit tourists". Yet these men are the real spongers who literally rob us of millions.

Myth 1 Migrants are 'benefit tourists' Ask any pensioner, single parent or unemployed person if they would travel halfway across the world to get their meagre benefits. They struggle to get by. Migrants will be even worse off. Home secretary David Blunkett has ruled migrants will not be allowed any benefits unless they have been working continuously in Britain for 12 months. This will give employers a green light to blackmail migrant workers to accept rotten pay and conditions.

DAVID BLUNKETT has proudly announced he is setting up a "British FBI". The Serious Organised Crime Agency is to have 5,000 staff, whose job will be to tackle crime. If Blunkett's agency is really a copycat FBI, then it's not top criminals who have something to fear.

Guantanamo-style 'justice' comes to New Labour Britain "I LIE awake at night searching...searching for the answer to the constant question, why me?" These are the words of a prisoner held in Belmarsh prison- Britain's Guantanamo Bay. He is one of 14 foreigners locked up under David Blunkett's anti-terrorism laws.

BRITISH AIRWAYS CitiExpress pilots, who staff its domestic operations, are in dispute over pay. Balpa, the pilots' union, has been conducting a consultative ballot among its 600 CitiExpress members to establish whether they are prepared to strike over cost-cutting and pay.

OVER 4,500 nursery nurses in Scotland are set to begin an all-out indefinite strike on Monday following a magnificent four to one vote. The action pits some of the lowest paid workers in education in Britain against predominantly Labour local authority employers. The fight over pay and regrading is crucial for public sector workers and beyond.

THERE WERE picket lines in towns and cities across Britain this week as 90,000 civil servants went on strike against low pay. Next week some 50,000 lecturers in the AUT union in universities will also strike. It is a sign that the growing anger over pay is turning into action. Millions of workers face the same struggle to make their wages last to the end of the month and pay the bills.

TENS OF thousands of university lecturers are to strike over pay across Britain and Northern Ireland next week. On Wednesday 47,000 lecturers belonging to the AUT union in the "old" universities, those which were never polytechnics, will be out. In addition to Wednesday's strike, lecturers in Wales will also strike on Monday, in England on Tuesday, in Scotland on Thursday and in Northern Ireland on Friday.