Wales Follow

Campaigners in Wales are building for the Wales and the World conference, which includes speakers like journalist George Monbiot, Barry Coates from the World Development Movement and writer Colin Hines.

Around 2,700 members of the PCS civil servants' union who work in the Crown Prosecution Service were due to strike across England and Wales on Wednesday and Thursday over pay. Around 700 workers in the service have joined the union over the last few months.

14 copies of Socialist Worker were sold outside Llanwern steel works in South Wales campaigning over the threatened closure, while 6 were sold at Cardiff's Penarth Road post office. 11 papers were sold at Aston post office in Birmingham along with 5 at Land Rover. Liverpool sales included 11 at the Royal Liverpool Hospital and 10 at Cammel Laird shipyard, while in Manchester 15 were sold at the Co-operative Insurance HQ and 3 at Moss Side Benefits Agency.

Around 1,900 Crown Prosecution Service workers in the PCS civil servants' union started their industrial action campaign over pay on Monday of this week. The action will severely disrupt the work of courts across England and Wales. Bosses claim that the workers are getting a 4.5 percent increase, but for most workers it will work out as 3.3 percent. Top lawyers will get an extra £10,000 a year, while administration staff will receive just £350 more.

TORIES AND religious fundamentalists are trying to unleash a flood of anti-gay bigotry. Catholic Cardinal Winning and millionaire owner of the Stagecoach empire Brian Souter (an evangelical Christian) are leading a crusade to keep the anti-gay Section 28 law in Scotland. Tory lords and Church of England bishops have now waded in to defend Section 28 in England and Wales. All of them claim they oppose discrimination. Yet recently Winning called homosexuality a "perversion" and likened gay people to Hitler's Nazis. His insult is sick beyond belief. Gays were one of the groups Hitler sent to concentration camps.

"UNCONVENTION" is an exhibition with a difference. It has been assembled by rock group the Manic Street Preachers on the theme of love and revolution. The show brings together paintings by Picasso and Jackson Pollock with posters from the Spanish Civil War and photographs of the work ers in the south Wales valleys.

MEMBERS OF the National Union of Teachers, the largest teachers' union in England and Wales, took part in a week of action against performance related pay last week. The government's plans to link pay to pupils' results are another way of pushing market forces into schools.

TEACHERS IN England and Wales remain adamantly opposed to New Labour's plans for performance related pay, even as their union leaders move to sell them out. That is the conclusion from a special conference of the second largest teachers' union in England, the NASUWT, on Saturday, and from the build up to a week of action by the largest, the NUT.

GRANTS MIGHT return for poorer students in Scotland. That could be the result of the political crisis over education funding that has swept the country. It would be a huge victory that could detonate a massive fight to bring back grants for students in England and Wales. The prospect of the return of grants is a result of the crisis facing the Scottish Executive.