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AN EMOTIONAL meeting of over 100 people in a Nottingham school celebrated a rare victory over David Blunkett and the Home Office last week. An Iraqi family seeking asylum in Britain, Jamil and Sara Daoud, and their four children, Majid (age 11), Hoda (nine), Mostafa (six) and Marwa (four), have beaten back a threat of deportation and are back in Nottingham.

MORE THAN 500 protesters marched against war and nuclear weapons in Plymouth last Saturday. The protest was called by the Nuclear Free Coalition in Plymouth and included a mass sit-down blockade of the main gate into the nuclear dockyard in the city. Devonport dockyard services Britain's nuclear fleet, including those carrying Trident nuclear missiles.

POSTAL WORKERS across Britain will soon start a strike ballot over their bosses' plans to privatise the Cash Handling and Distribution (CHD) section. The Post Office wants to sell CHD to Securicor, a full privatisation that will affect 3,000 workers.

THE TRIAL of six Asian men from Burnley who defended their community against racists was set to finish this week. The court in Preston has heard powerful arguments about how Nazi British National Party members terrorised Burnley in June last year. Tariq Saddique, Mohammed Bashir, Asif Khan, Mohammed Nawaz and a 17 year old who cannot be identified are pleading not guilty to the charge of violent disorder. One 18 year old has felt forced to plead guilty.

THE US and Britain want war on Iraq no matter what. That is the only possible meaning of the resolution which the US and Britain want to bribe and bully the rest of the United Nations (UN) Security Council into accepting.

SIX MILLION people in Britain have had letters this year warning that they may not be able to pay off the mortgages on their homes. Millions more with similar "endowment" mortgages will get such letters in the coming months.

TONY BENN'S political journey has been one of the most remarkable in the history of the British labour movement. Many figures have started out on the left, only to become dedicated defenders of capitalism by the time they have reached middle age.

JOAN LITTLEWOOD, who died at the age of 87 last month, was arguably the major figure of radical political theatre in Britain. She dedicated her life to the theatre, and entertaining and educating working class people.

ONE IN three of Britain's 12 million children live in poverty, a figure that has hardly changed since New Labour came to office. That stark figure brings home how little all the government's initiatives, and its babble about "social inclusion", have achieved. A wide-ranging survey, commissioned by Save the Children and carried out by researchers at the University of York, has just been released.

NEWSPAPERS REPORT that we are eating fewer potatoes. The British Potato Council says sales of fresh potatoes fell dramatically in the past ten years. At the start of the 1990s 80 percent of potatoes were bought as nature intended. Today only around half of all the spuds consumed in Britain come as real potatoes.

UNISON MEMBERS facing Britain's biggest PFI project have voted overwhelmingly to take strike action against an attempt to break their union. In a consultative ballot 78 percent voted to back an official strike ballot demanding the reinstatement of their union branch secretary, Phil Billows. Phil was suspended for spearheading a campaign against the huge PFI project at the Royal London and Barts NHS trust.

FIREFIGHTERS AND control staff across Britain are already returning a big yes vote in their strike ballot, which began last week, according to Fire Brigades Union regional reps. Documents from the Ministry of Defence have revealed that the government is to ship 3,000 of the troops it had trained to scab on any strike to the Gulf. Last weekend also saw a taste of the kind of propaganda New Labour is prepared to put out in an effort to undermine high levels of public support for the FBU union's campaign.