Tony Blair has always edged away from a full scale confrontation involving more than one group of workers. He has emulated Margaret Thatcher, whose strategy was to pick off one group at a time, starting with the weakest.
The Labour Party traditionally filled two roles. It claimed to give a voice to working people’s aspirations for change and then ensured these were directed along constitutional channels. Tony Blair’s New Labour doesn’t even bother with the hopes of working people.
The British papers greeted the recent heatwave with pictures of crowded beaches. In Gaza, one of the most crowded corners of this planet, the beach provides one of few escapes.
Many people think that putting Gordon Brown into 10 Downing Street would herald a return to Old Labour policies. They might be right. In the 1960s and 1970s, Labour presided over a host of pay freezes and incomes policy initiatives. These led to a drop in living standards for workers, especially the lowest paid.
The Afghan capital Kabul was the one place US and Nato occupation forces and the government of president Hamid Karzai could claim control. But an uprising this week, after a US military truck crashed into rush hour traffic killing at least five people, was a major show of opposition to an occupation in which British forces are taking a leading role.
During the Vietnam War, the US ruling class reacted to growing domestic opposition to the conflict by getting locally recruited forces to take over the bulk of the fighting, and thus the bulk of the casualties. The process was known as "Vietnamisation".
A single British company produced more carbon dioxide last year than all of Croatia. Eon UK, which owns Powergen, is Britain’s biggest corporate emitter of greenhouse gases. Last year it produced 27 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
When Venezuela's radical president, Hugo Chavez, visits London early next week, he will be a guest of mayor Ken Livingstone.
For 12 years Tony Blair and his coterie have driven New Labour towards its slavish worship of the free market. Its decision to back George Bush and his wars flowed from a shared commitment to serve the interests of the wealthy and powerful. At each stage the Blairites have treated Labour’s traditional working class supporters with contempt.
The US, reveals the Washington Post this week, is engaged in planning military operations in 20 countries across five continents as part of its "long war" against terror.
Margaret Hodge, New Labour’s employment minister and MP for Barking & Dagenham in east London, claimed last Sunday that eight out of ten white families in her constituency are tempted to vote for the fascist British National Party (BNP).
The revelation by the leading US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that the cabal in the White House is considering a nuclear attack on Iran should ring alarm bells across the world.
