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THE QUICKSANDS of Morecambe Bay became a grave for 19 Chinese workers last week. Their job was to pick cockles for low wages, working all hours in dangerous conditions, with no rights. Some of the last tabloid articles they would have seen were about how people from abroad "are heading to Britain to leech on us" and branded them all "benefit tourists".

SOME 200 years of struggle by working people in Britain is the theme for a new website which the Trades Union Congress has helped put together. "The Union Makes Us Strong-TUC History Online" covers the years 1815 to 2000. Its motivation is the fact that "trade unions have played and continue to play a decisive role in shaping economic and social developments in Britain. Yet much of their history is at present unknown and inaccessible to the public."

BBC WORKERS across Britain staged lunchtime protests on Thursday of last week, following their spontaneous walkouts a week earlier over the Hutton whitewash. The mood of anger against the government, and the BBC governors who had issued a grovelling apology to Blair, was clear. So too was a determination to resist government attempts to exercise even more control of the BBC.

ONCE UPON a time the Hutton report might have worked. Lord Hutton himself represented the British army at Lord Widgery's inquiry into the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in January 1972. Widgery produced probably the greatest official whitewash in 20th century British history. After a chat with the prime minister, Edward Heath, he exonerated the Parachute Regiment of the charge of killing 13 unarmed civilians.

The vote for student top-up fees and the scandal of the Hutton report sent waves of anger around Britain. Much of the mainstream media has ignored this grassroots revolt. Here we print some of the many e-mails readers sent to Socialist Worker and comments from high-profile anti-war campaigners

BOB McNEILL, Mark Crossland and Eddie Grimes, who are taking part in Britain's longest running industrial dispute, travelled to London on Thursday of last week to attend their bosses' appeal at the Employment Appeal Tribunal offices. They were part of a group of workers in the Amicus union at the William Cook's foundry in Sheffield who were told not to return to work after striking for one day in April 2001. They have been campaigning since.

THE NEW mood in workplaces across Britain is shown well by the experience in one city-Sheffield.

BRITAIN IS poised to become one of the most successful 21st century nations, brags Tony Blair. But for millions of British workers life feels like it is going backwards to Victorian days, not forwards to a better future.

WE’VE NOT seen the like of Hutton’s PR job for Tony Blair since Lord Widgery’s cover-up of the Bloody Sunday shootings 32 years ago. Back then Brian Hutton was barrister for the British army, which got away with killing 14 peaceful demonstrators in Northern Ireland.

Tom Hurndall, the British peace activist who was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier in April last year, died last week.

Who would have thought that the best known writer of spy novels in Britain in the late 20th century would become one of the finest literary critics of neo-liberalism, war and empire in the 21st?

IT COULD have been a scene from the darkest chapters of the British Empire.