Author: Admin

Following the elections to the European parliament in June, Sascha Staničić, national spokesperson from Socialist Organisation Solidarity (Sol – CWI in Germany), analyses the development of right-wing populism in Europe.

The phenomenon of right-wing populism is not new in most countries, but there is much to suggest that it has reached a new level. Not only because in opinion polls and elections the share of votes of right-wing populist parties has grown significantly, but also because they have got hold of, in one form or another, the levers of government at regional or even national level in more countries. On 16 September 2023, the British financial magazine, The Economist, published an article entitled The Hard Right Is Getting Closer To Power All Over Europe.

Read more →

The New Popular Front (NPF) received the most seats in the recent parliamentary elections in France, 182 out of the 577 total in the National Assembly. Standing on a programme of reducing the pension age to 60 – reversing President Emmanuel Macron’s ‘reform’; freezing the price of energy and basic necessities; ending austerity; increasing the minimum wage; indexing wages to inflation; reforming Macron’s immigration law, and ending the genocide in Gaza, it beat Macron’s bloc, Ensemble (with 163 seats), and pushed Marine Le Pen’s right-populist Rassemblement National (RN) and her allies into third place (143 seats).

Read more →

The Carnation Revolution: The day Portugal’s dictatorship fell

By Alex Fernandes

Published by Oneworld Publications, 2024, £22

Reviewed by Kevin Parslow

1974 was a year of great upheavals worldwide. A miners’ strike led to the ousting of a hated Tory government in Britain; the Greek colonels’ junta was overthrown after a disastrous military excursion in Cyprus; President Richard Nixon had to leave office in disgrace, implicated in the Watergate cover-up. But none of these had greater opportunities for the working class to take power than the Portuguese revolution of that year, which continued into 1975. Sadly, this chance was missed.

Read more →

Short of a Lazarus-style miracle Tory resurrection the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer will be installed in Downing Street on July 5, ushering in a turbulent new period in Britain.

Amidst the driving rain and whirr of overhead TV helicopters accompanying prime minister Rishi Sunak’s hapless live general election announcement speech, the strains of the 1997 ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ New Labour anthem could be heard, broadcast by nearby protesters. A Tory wipeout of similar proportions is entirely possible this time too. But any hopes that a Starmer-led government can replicate the relative stability of the first Tony Blair administration will not be fulfilled. “They may ring their bells now”, said the first de facto prime minister of Britain, Sir Robert Walpole – although the prevailing sentiment today is more one of disillusionment with all ‘politicians’ – but “before long they will be wringing their hands”.

Read more →

The forms may have changed but racism is still deeply embedded in Britain’s capitalist society. Which is why, argues ISAI MARIJELA, the call for system change – socialism – is central to the struggle against it.

Racism remains a part of everyday life for Britain’s Black and Asian people. Shocking figures and statistics reveal the conditions facing people of colour. They are more likely to be in insecure jobs, live in the worst housing and health situations, and suffer disproportionately as a result of the cost-of-living crisis. They are two and a half times more likely to be in poverty than white people.

On top of that, they also face racial discrimination at the hands of the police and other capitalist institutions. The latest government figures on police stop and search show that, in the year to March 2022, there were 27.2 stop and searches carried out for every 1,000 black people, compared with 5.6 for every 1,000 white people.

Report after report reveals the unjust and unequal treatment of Black and Asian workers in workplaces. A 2020 Trades Union Congress report, Dying on the Job, painted a shocking picture of how Black and Asian workers were treated while working through the pandemic.

Fighting racism is an immediate issue that must be addressed in Britain, and a serious discussion and debate needs to take place on what tactics, approach and programme are required to smash it.

Read more →

HUGO PIERRE reviews a recent book that looks at both the life and the political struggles of US civil rights activist and anti-racist campaigner Martin Luther King.

King: The Life of Martin Luther King

By Jonathan Eig

Published by Simon and Schuster, 2023, £25

Martin Luther King the pacifist, the compromiser and reformist, the acceptable face of the civil rights struggle versus Malcolm X, the revolutionary, the uncompromising face of the struggle for Black liberation – or this is how it has been portrayed. A section of the US establishment effectively ‘cannonised’ King to prevent a new generation of Black youth from discovering the mass militant methods of struggle he supported and unleashed from the mid-1950s until after his death.

King became fully immersed in these methods which brought him both an audience and in bitter conflict with the highest levels of the US state. Jonathan Eig’s biography aims to reconnect King with the militant insurrectionary movement King took part in and led at various points, the vicious attempts of the state to repress him and the movement, and explores the ideology that inspired his tactics.

Read more →

Are the struggles against racism in Britain and the USA different? What is the relationship between race, class and national identity? APRIL ASHLEY, a female Black members’ representative on the national executive council of public sector union Unison, reviews in a personal capacity a recent book that raises these issues.

This Is Not America – Why Black Lives in Britain Matter

By Tomiwa Owolade

Published by Atlantic Books, 2023, £9.49

Following the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement after the racist murder of George Floyd in 2020, this book by Tomiwa Owolade, a Nigerian-born British writer, is an easy and interesting read, discussing the different experience of racism in America and Britain

Owolade argues that although all Black people suffer from racism there is a difference being Black American and Black British because of the differences in history and culture. And although, ostensibly, a simple argument, Owolade sets out to explore exactly what this means.

Read more →

The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government

By David Torrance

Published by Bloomsbury, 2024, £20

Reviewed by Nick Chaffey

War and revolutions, mass strikes and demonstrations, economic and political crisis, four elections in six years. Sounds familiar? But this was 1924 – Labour in government for the first time faced with a deep economic and social crisis.

David Torrance’s book, The Wild Men, implies this was a government that pursued radical policies. But those policies, feared by the ruling capitalist class and hoped for by the working class, didn’t materialise. As a force for socialist change, Labour’s first government failed, opening up a stormy and revolutionary period in British history.

Read more →

Can’t Pay Won’t Pay – A Short History of the Anti-Poll Tax Struggle 1989-1993

By Chris Robinson

Published by Thinkwell Books, 2023, £10

Reviewed by Eric Segal

The struggle and victory against the poll tax was a significant event in British working-class history. Militant (the forerunner of the Socialist Party), which led the campaign, did what the Labour Party and trade union leadership had failed to do over nine years of vicious Tory anti-working class policies. In a clear lesson for today’s trade union leaders, co-ordinated, united and generalised class struggle defeated the poll tax and brought down the government of Margaret Thatcher.

Read more →

Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington

Imperial War Museum, London

20 April 2024 – 29 September 2024

Reviewed by Paul Heron

Just occasionally when you’re flicking through Netflix you’ll come across something that immediately pulls you in, and when you watch it, you want to tell all your mates about it. For me that programme was  Which Way Is the Front Line from Here?, a documentary by Sebastian Junger. The film is a heartfelt and insightful tribute to Tim Hetherington, the British photographer tragically killed in Misrata during the Libyan conflict in 2011.

Read more →