Britain Follow

A CLEAR majority of people in Britain now think the war on Iraq was wrong. An opinion poll in the Guardian on Monday showed 53 percent think the war was unjustified and only 38 percent believe it was right to attack Iraq. This is the reality looming over Tony Blair at his party's conference starting on Sunday.

POSTAL WORKERS are in a bitter struggle with their bosses which will affect the confidence of workers and managers right across Britain. Crucial strikes are scheduled for next week. Several key mail centres were on the verge of unofficial strikes on Tuesday.

THE BRUTAL reality of working life in Britain was shown in two industrial tribunal cases revealed in the press last week. Joanne MacDonald, a former telesales worker, lost her baby after being sacked for being pregnant.

TRADE UNIONS in the north east of England are at the forefront of local campaigns against the Nazi British National Party (BNP). This was shown at the TUC Northern Region's anti-racism training day held in Sunderland last Saturday.

TONY BLAIR likes to give the impression that widespread anti-war opposition across Britain has not swayed his government's actions. The facts show this is a lie. The Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly has exposed how Blair's obsession with undermining anti-war resistance has driven every twist and turn in recent British politics.

INTENSE negotiations are taking place at the United Nations Security Council about the possibility of the UN taking responsibility for running Iraq. Many people, disgusted by the US and Britain's role, feel that it would be a good move for the UN to take over.

THOUSANDS OF innocent and often vulnerable people are held on remand in British prisons. And too often they are driven to commit suicide, according to a new report by the Prison Reform Trust. The trust says that 36 prisoners awaiting trial committed suicide last year-that's the equivalent of a death every ten days.

"IRAQ: THE New War". That headline in the prestigious New York Review of Books captures the scale of the fighting that continues in Iraq. The word occupation does not adequately describe what is happening. There is a new phase in this war that we were assured was won when Western television stations took carefully choreographed shots of the fall of statues to Saddam Hussein five months ago. It is like the colonial wars conducted in the 1950s by the British army in Kenya, Malaysia, Aden and Cyprus, and by France in Algeria.

PROTESTERS celebrated the collapse of World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks in Cancun, Mexico, on Sunday as a defeat for the global corporations and the world's most powerful governments. Commentators in Britain, from the Guardian to former New Labour minister Clare Short (masquerading in Cancun as a BBC reporter), argued that the Cancun collapse was a "blow to the world economy" and a "setback for the world's poor".

Black in the day: another story UK Black Tuesday 23 September, 8.30pm, Radio 2 WHAT WOULD popular music in Britain sound like if there had been no migration of people from the Caribbean? And what was it about the experiences of blacks in Britain that led them to create such vibrant and path-breaking sounds? In this series Courtney Pine interviews musicians, DJs, clubbers and promoters with some brilliant insights along the way.

MEMBERS OF Amicus, the second biggest union in Britain, are getting set for national executive elections that could transform the union. The merger of the MSF and AEEU unions will be completed on 1 January 2004. Right wing leaderships have dominated both unions for years.

ENGINEERS AT British Airways voted by over two to one to reject a 3 percent pay offer that was tied to a new swipe card time recording system. The introduction of the swipe card system was the issue that saw check-in staff take extremely effective unofficial action at Heathrow two months ago.