Socialism Today

The slogan of the International Youth Walkout taking place in at least twelve countries across Europe on 20 November is ‘fight for our future – not their wars’. Across Europe, that fight has already erupted. Many workers and young people in Britain will be inspired by the wave of mass strikes and protests across the continent. Whether it’s the magnificent movement of school students and workers in France; the tens of thousands of school students striking against militarism in Germany; the hundreds-of-thousands-strong movement over housing costs in the Spanish state, which has now led to a 24-hour general strike being called for 11 November; the public sector strike over pay in the Irish Republic, the biggest for forty years; the student movement-initiated electoral overturn of the Serbian government and the challenge in Albania; or the movements now also developing in Italy, Belgium, Greece and Portugal.

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The latest UN climate summit, COP31, is being held against a backdrop of unprecedented climate chaos, with extreme temperatures, wildfires and droughts across the northern hemisphere. The meeting is taking place in Turkiye, but co-chaired by Turkiye and Australia as a compromise, after Australia lost its battle to be the host nation.

In the run-up to COP31, the UN produced a report of the latest data on global warming.  It acknowledges that the aim of the 2015 landmark Paris agreement has not been met to keep temperature rises below 1.5C compared to pre-industrial times, needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming. On present trends there will be a disastrous 2.3C rise, but if carbon dioxide emissions, the main gas cause of climate change, are cut 50% by 2035, the rise could be limited to 1.8C. This is a significant figure because with anything higher it will be impossible to return to 1.5C, according to the UN report.

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What does Burnham’s leadership of the Labour Party mean for working-class political representation now?, asks HANNAH SELL.

The crisis of working-class political representation has been a central but largely unspoken feature of British society for many decades now. The absence of a mass party that fights to defend the interests of the working class in parliament and the council chambers has made it easier for the capitalist class to drive down the living standards of the working class and much of the middle class over a prolonged period. For a time, when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, there was an opening for Labour to be transformed into a workers’ party but that opportunity was squandered.

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PHILIP STOTT looks at recent developments of the various national questions across the UK in the context of the new Burnham government.

The ‘constitutional issues’, or national questions as Marxists refer to them, in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, have been further catapulted into the spotlight recently. US president Trump’s visit to the Republic of Ireland in September saw him comment that he would “love to see” a united Ireland.

On 14 September, leaders of the Scottish National Party (SNP), Sinn Féin and Plaid Cymru – the so-called ‘Celtic Alliance’ – met in Cardiff to sign a declaration stating: “Westminster’s time is coming to an end”. Their memorandum went on: “We call for the British government to prepare for, plan and facilitate constitutional change in each jurisdiction”.

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In this hundredth anniversary year of the 1926 general strike, JIM HORTON looks at how the ruling class has used the welfare system against the working class.

On 5 July 1926, less than two months after the Trades Union Congress called off the general strike, leaving the miners to fight alone against wage cuts and longer hours, the House of Commons debated the Board of Guardians (Default) Bill.

During the debate, George Lansbury, Labour MP for Poplar, attacked the government’s use of the Poor Law against striking miners and condemned the threat of the workhouse as a means of forcing down relief payments: “One of the oldest tricks in the Poor Law book; I know, and the Hon. Gentleman knows, that Boards of Guardians who want to cut down public assistance always use the weapon of the ‘house’ in order to bring that about”.

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In the latest installment in our China Debate series we are reprinting, in a slightly shortened version, an article by LYNN WALSH which first appeared under the title, The Chinese Puzzle, in the March-April 1994 edition (No.56) of the Militant International Review, the predecessor magazine to Socialism Today. Written against the immediate backdrop of the collapse of Stalinism in Russia and Eastern Europe from 1989-1991 it not surprisingly anticipates that, at some stage, China too would decisively complete its transition to capitalism. Whether it has done so or not is still, of course, a point of contention today but, as a real time contribution from over thirty years ago, the article remains as a valuable insight into the roots of the complex phenomena of the state and economy in modern China.

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Disability: A History of Resistance

By David Turner.

Published by Random House, 2026, £12.99

Reviewed by David Maples

David Turner has written an enthralling book. Although he is an academic social and cultural historian, the book is accessible and written for a lay audience.

His central approach is not to focus on exclusion but on the history of creativity, resilience and struggle for acceptance. In bringing suppressed histories to light he aims to shift perspectives, challenge assumptions and offer a new lens through which to understand both the past and the present. In particular he gives a platform to people with the lived experience of impairment as experts in describing the problems they face and in offering solutions.

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Rot: A History Of The Irish Famine

By Padraic X Scanlan

Published by Robinson, 2025, £12.99

Reviewed by Niall Mulholland

The ‘Irish potato famine’ (1845–52) as it is described by bourgeois history books in Britain, or An Gorta Mór (‘The Great Hunger’) as it is known by many Irish people, is not simply understood as a distant historical event in Ireland. It is passed down through generations, embedded in the collective psyche of a people whose poor ancestors were starved by the most powerful empire on earth while ships laden with grain and livestock sailed from Irish ports to English markets.

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