Britain Follow

Time for us to move on from New Labour As a Labour Party member and lifelong Labour supporter, I remember with all the romanticism of a true party faithful the glorious victory of 1 May 1997. It seems like a lifetime ago. Yet I remember the excitement and optimism. We were promised a new Britain and that "things can only get better". Where did it all go wrong?

A strike and demonstration by over 40,000 teachers in and around London on Thursday of last week was the biggest for 30 years. It marked a turning point. "I feel we are laying to rest the ghosts of 20 years of demoralisation," said one experienced teacher as she sped by with a group of recent university graduates.

The biggest conference of rank and file trade unionists for two decades took place in London last Saturday. Over 1,000 trade unionists from across Britain came to the event organised by the Socialist Alliance, which will be standing hundreds of candidates at the May local elections. The Scottish Socialist Party also supported it. The conference signalled a further step in the deepening rift between the government and trade unionists.

Ballots are now under way in Birmingham and Glasgow. Britain's two biggest council landlords are asking their tenants to say yes to transfer to housing associations.

Don't give them more power I am appalled by recent comments from Mike Best, who is the editor of the Voice, a newspaper aimed at Britain's black people. He said that most black people would welcome the police increasing the number of stop and searches.

This month sees key battles in a largely unreported war over the future of one of the pillars of the welfare state. Tenants of Britain's two biggest landlords, Birmingham and Glasgow councils, will vote on New Labour plans to hand their homes to private housing companies. Thousands of tenants in Crewe are already voting in a similar ballot, and Bradford council tenants will also vote this month.

DO YOU feel tempted to write a satirical novel about Blair's Britain, as you did Margaret Thatcher's Britain? I AM looking forward to writing that. It is where the sequel to my current novel The Rotters' Club is going. The horrible young Thatcherite in the new book will grow into a Blairite whizz-kid MP for a West Midlands constituency.

STRIKERS FROM all over Britain lobbied the national executive meeting of the civil servants' PCS union last week. They were representing 750 people who work in the government's trial Pathfinder scheme which merges job centres and benefits offices. They have been on all-out strike since at least last October.

THE NAZI British National Party (BNP) hopes to make a historic breakthrough in the local council elections in seven weeks time on 2 May. Anti-Nazi activists are mobilising to stop it. The annual conference of the Anti Nazi League (ANL) was held in Manchester last Saturday.

LIFT WORKERS employed by Otis, Britain's biggest lift manufacturer, began an national overtime ban last week over pay.

POSTAL WORKERS in the CWU union will take to the streets in London on Saturday to say no to privatisation. Postcomm, the postal regulator appointed by government, has proposed that private firms should be allowed to grab almost half the mail in Britain from April.

Children ripped apart by tank shells as they play. Women shot dead by army snipers in their own homes. Houses smashed to rubble by F-16 fighter jets. A doctor deliberately shot dead in his own ambulance as he rushes to help the injured. This is the reality of Ariel Sharon's massacre of Palestinian civilians. It is the reality that the British media try to ignore. They concentrate on reporting only the Israeli casualties.