Socialist Party magazine
The risk of universities going bankrupt made it onto Keir Starmer’s pre-election ‘shitlist’ of major early challenges facing a Labour government.
Will Starmer’s Labour government raise tuition fees? Will it be the first to let a university go bankrupt on its watch?
Read moreIn early 2024, an unpublished report from the US Geological Survey (USGS) found that there is as much as five trillion tonnes of natural hydrogen underground. A fraction of those five trillion tonnes would be enough to supply all global energy needs for the foreseeable future, claimed USGS researcher Geoffery Ellis reporting to the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Denver earlier this year.
Read moreRecently there has been a proliferation of articles, books, reports and surveys looking at boys and young men: the problems they face and their ‘backsliding’ attitudes towards girls, women and feminism. Some of these exaggerate, distort or take a one-sided view of findings in order to promote a ‘gender war’ narrative or argue that feminism has ‘gone too far’. Others are more balanced and nuanced. Catherine Carr’s Radio Four documentary, About the Boys, is in the latter category – a series of interviews with teenage boys from different backgrounds and geographical areas, speaking frankly about the difficulties of being a boy in today’s world.
Read moreThe miners’ strike became a long, bitter industrial dispute. It drew in large layers of the working class, including women, Black and Asian workers, and members of the LGBT community. They gave their time, solidarity, and money to keep the strike going.
Read moreWhat Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom
By Arash Azizi
Published by Oneworld, 2024, £14.99
What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom is described as the first major book on the 2022-23 uprising in Iran. Protests were sparked in September 2022 after the murder of Masha Amini, a 21-year-old woman from a Kurdish background, who was brutally beaten by the ‘moral security’ division of the Iranian police, dying from her injuries. She had been arrested in Tehran for the “inappropriate wearing of the headscarf”. Thousands came to her funeral, with slogans including “death to the dictator”, and the epitaph on her gravestone was “your name will become a symbol”.
Read moreThe Undesirables: the law that locked away a generation
By Sarah Wise
Published by Oneworld Publications, 2024, £22
Reviewed by Leah Byatt
The social care sector should play a valuable and essential role in society, ensuring disadvantaged layers of our communities can access the resources and support they need for a secure, healthy, and meaningful existence. But it is a sector that is vastly underfunded under the capitalist system, leading to exploitation of workers and service users alike.
The Undesirables shines a light on a shameful history. Highlighting key developments over the past hundred years, it helps contextualise how we’ve reached the stage we have with the social care sector today.
Read moreIn reviewing my book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: A Short History of the Anti-Poll Tax Struggle (Thinkwell Books), you presented a comprehensive look at the Tories’ poll tax and our historic victory against it (Socialism Today No.278, June 2024). However, I disagree that I “mistakenly leave open the possibility of resuscitating Starmer’s Labour Party”.
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