Class Follow

In February 1936 in Spain a Popular Front government was elected by a radicalised working class. People hoped it would be a bulwark against fascism. Fascist General Franco launched a coup in July. He was beaten back by Spanish workers who mobilised to defend the republic. Civil war raged.

THE 1980s were characterised by the dominance of Thatcher and Reagan, rabid supporters of the market. Workers were hit by recessions and a ruling class eager to ram through attacks on union organisation. There were important struggles in the 1980s-in Poland the Solidarity movement sparked a wave of protests in Eastern Europe that shook the regimes to the core.

RIGHT WING commentators love nothing so much as to pour derision on John Prescott's inability to speak in coherent sentences. The snob Tory historian David Starkey summed up their attitude on Question Time last week. Prescott, he claimed, showed what horrors followed if any working class person was allowed to escape from the fate decreed for them in the old selective school system. Starkey destroyed his own argument by sinking into incoherence in the face of a hostile audience reaction. But he had already showed that for an alleged historian he has a very short memory.

THE NEW Assembly in Northern Ireland has been welcomed by nearly everyone except a tiny minority of hardline Unionists gathered around Ian Paisley. Millions of people are hoping the new Assembly will mean the dawn of a new era of peace in Northern Ireland. Many ordinary Protestants and Catholics are also hoping that the new Assembly will begin to tackle poverty, unemployment and declining welfare services. But the real question is whether the new Assembly will be able to deliver the peace and prosperity so many people in Northern Ireland are hoping for.

MANY PEOPLE might have expected politics to be winding down in the run up to Xmas and the millennium celebrations. But the opposite is true. New Labour's pro-business and anti working class policies have led to an outburst of anger. It was set to announce more reactionary measures in the Queen's Speech on Wednesday.

ORDINARY PEOPLE in Northern Ireland will be hoping for an end to the war which has blighted their lives as politicians continued to haggle over a peace deal this week. We did not know the final outcome of the talks as Socialist Worker went to press. But even if a deal is struck, the struggle for a better future for working class people is far from over.

SOCIALIST Worker editor Chris Harman opened the conference with a session on the "New World Disorder". He argued that the starting point for socialists is the huge political and economic instability across the globe. "People should cast their minds back ten years to the euphoria of the ruling class at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall," Chris said.

SOCIALIST WORKER'S appeal burst through the £100,000 mark this week. Now the total has reached £114,448.51. The money we received included £365 raised from a walk by 50 people around London's East End through the sites of great working class struggles like the Match Girls' strike in 1888. A walking tour round Manchester raised £214.

WEEKS AFTER Tony Blair proclaimed at Labour's conference that the class struggle is over, a damning new report shows that class division has never been greater in Britain. The survey was based on four million households across Britain. It shows that after two years of Labour in office inequality is growing. For a few there is immense wealth and opulence. For the majority there is insecurity and either very real poverty or the threat of poverty.

Scottish director Bill Forsyth's new film Gregory's Two Girls is on general release. By choosing to make a belated sequel to his 1981 film, Forsyth has taken a calculated risk. The original Gregory's Girl was a gem of a film. It was a story about working class teenagers set in the new town of Cumbernauld on the outskirts of Glasgow. It made Forsyth's name as an accomplished film maker. He went on to make the whimsical Local Hero and the much underrated Comfort and Joy.