Socialism Today – Page 5 – Socialist Party magazine

What strategy for the ‘lost generation’?

1 April, 2026Admin

“This country is now facing the existential risk of a lost generation”. Those were the words of Alan Milburn, the Blairite former health minister, speaking in February about his ongoing review into ‘NEETs’: young people not in education, employment, or training.

The ‘Milburn Review’ is set to be released in the summer, with an interim report due later this spring. According to the most recent figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), almost one million 16-24 year olds in Britain (957,000) were in the category of NEET as of December 2025.

Labour’s new attack on local government

1 April, 2026Admin

Local government reorganisation is being presented by ministers and council leaders as a rational, modernising reform – a necessary step to “streamline services”, “drive efficiencies” and create “strategic authorities fit for the future”. In reality this poses one of the most serious threats to local democracy, jobs, pay and public services in a generation. For working-class communities and council workers alike, local government reorganisation risks becoming austerity by another name.

Trump’s war on the climate

1 April, 2026Admin

US president Donald Trump is continuing his attacks on climate regulation, with his latest focus on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for setting national environmental standards in the US. He has moved to rescind the ‘endangerment finding’, the legal foundation underpinning key regulations on pollution, boasting “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen”.

The endangerment finding, issued under Barak Obama, formally concluded that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health. It has been called the climate ‘Magna Carta’: its removal could unravel the entire edifice of US climate regulation, stripping the legal basis from rules limiting heat-trapping pollution from automobiles to power plants.

UCU: Building a fighting democratic union

1 April, 2026Admin

This year the University and College Union (UCU) will be marking its 20th anniversary. Drawing lessons from the two decades of its existence, BEA GARDNER explains how a genuinely combative member-led union can be built.

The University and College Union (UCU) was founded in 2006 following the merger of the Association of University Teachers (AUT), which represented workers in the old universities, and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), which represented workers in colleges and new universities. As a result UCU became the largest post-16 education union in the world. UCU covers Higher Education (HE), Further Education (FE), Adult and Community Education (ACE) and prison education and has over 120,000 members organised in branches according to their employers and corresponding sector.

1916 and the real legacy of James Connolly

1 April, 20261 April, 2026Admin

April is the anniversary of the 1916 Easter rising and the execution by the British state of the great Irish Marxist James Connolly. In commemoration we reprint below an article by PETER HADDEN, a leading member of the CWI until his death in 2010, reviewing Connolly’s life of unremitting struggle, first published in Socialism Today No.100, April 2006. This is followed, on page 28, by a contemporary article by Vladimir Lenin, defending the rising and drawing inspiration from it amidst the slaughter of a world at war.

In 1910 James Connolly concluded his pamphlet, Labour, Nationality and Religion, in the simplest and most straightforward terms: “The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system, it must go”. On the anniversary of his death it is necessary to begin any true account of James Connolly’s life with reminders of what he really believed in, what he really fought for.

The Irish rebellion of 1916

1 April, 20261 April, 2026Admin

The Easter rising was a defeat, acknowledged as such by Vladimir Lenin in the article written in the summer of 1916 reprinted below. “The misfortune” of the Irish rebels, he argued, was that “they rose prematurely”, before the inevitable revolt of the working classes of Europe against the horrors of the first world war “had had time to mature”.

Laying bare workers’ exploitation in China

1 April, 20261 April, 2026Admin

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

By Hu Anyan

Published by Allen Lane, 2025, £12.99

Reviewed by Pete Mason

In September 2020, a video of an elite Tsinghua university student perilously riding his bicycle while working on his laptop went viral in China. He came to symbolise the crazy, self-defeating race to the bottom, termed ‘involution’, caused by extreme competition.

Within a year, involution hashtags were viewed over a billion times in China. The term ‘996’ had gone viral in China in 2019. Working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, is demanded ‘voluntarily’ by many firms, particularly in IT and very typically of Chinese migrant workers, who have gone in search of work in other provinces.

Editorial: A crisis of capitalist political representation

3 March, 2026Admin

Yet again, Britain has a ‘dead prime minister walking’. Keir Starmer has survived his worst crisis yet, for now, but he is living on borrowed time. The next convulsion at the top of the Labour Party is possible at any point, perhaps triggered as soon as the result of the Gorton and Denton by-election. The capitalist media is full of discussion about Starmer’s weaknesses, the personal ambitions of the different contenders to replace him, and the undoubted scheming and manoeuvring for position on all sides.

None of this surface commentary, however, explains the root cause of the current crisis. Starmer is Britain’s fourth prime minister in four years. In the post-second world war period, prior to the 2007-08 financial crash, there was only one prime minister who was forced out of office in three years or less, the Tory Anthony Eden who resigned after the 1956 Suez Crisis. Since the financial crash and subsequent Great Recession, no prime minster governing on behalf of a single party has survived into a fourth year. Tony Blair, who stepped down as prime minister in June 2007, was the last to do so.

Police ‘reforms’ anticipate big class battles

3 March, 2026Admin

“These are the most significant changes to how policing works in this country in around 200 years”. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s assertion to the Commons this January is true, if the core restructures in her white paper are implemented. From Local to National: A New Model for Policing contains the only proposals from this pro-capitalist Labour government to show any semblance of ambition. It is telling that the proposals in question are an attempt to consolidate the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state.

Global Warning: AI and climate change

3 March, 2026Admin

According to new research, by improving efficiency in all aspects of power generation and in society generally, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to reduce by up to 54 billion tonnes the annual global greenhouse emissions – due to burning fossil fuels like coal and gas – that are driving climate change, 10% of the present figure. This is after allowing for the huge quantity of energy needed to run AI computer software, widely reported as a threat to the environment. How realistic is the report’s claim, particularly since the great majority of power is still generated using fossil fuels?

Processing the quantity and variety of data needed to run AI computer software like Chat-GPT requires far more electricity than that used, for example, for task-specific computer modelling, such as to solve particular medical or scientific problems. This is because AI software is multi-purpose, ie it is designed to answer any question on any subject. Also, ‘training’ AI programmes before they can be used uses large amounts of energy. Training Open AI’s GPT-3 required enough electricity to power 120 average US households for one year, according to Carbon Brief. Recent research claimed that compared to task-specific software, AI uses up to 33 times more energy. An AI data processing centre could consume as much energy as a small town.