Socialism Today

Late last year the Labour government announced plans to increase university tuition fees from September 2025, by lifting the cap on full-time undergraduate fees in England from £9,250 to £9,585 per year. This won’t solve the crisis of higher education funding, argues ADAM POWELL-DAVIES, and students and campus workers need to prepare for the battles ahead.

The government’s announcement last November brings an end to an eight-year period in which tuition fees have stood still. Beginning under prime minister Theresa May, Conservative governments had steered well clear of increasing fees, seen by most Tory MPs as ‘politically toxic’.

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In the light of a recently published book that gives a glimpse of the social mores of Victorian England regarding birth control and women’s sexuality, ELEANOR DONNE looks at the historical struggle for contraception and, in particular, the role of working-class women within that struggle.

A Dirty, Filthy Book: Sex, Scandal, and One Woman’s Fight in the Victorian Trial of the Century

By Michael Meyer

Published by WH Allen, 2024, £25

A Dirty Filthy Book tells the story of the trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh – free thinking, radical publishers based in London – who in 1877 were prosecuted under censorship laws for printing and selling a pamphlet called The Fruits of Philosophy, written by an American doctor, Charles Knowlton. The pamphlet contained information about the ‘mechanics’ of sex, genitalia, methods of contraception, and menstruation. Knowlton had printed it in restricted numbers in a very small, ‘discreet’ format for his young married patients. But Besant and Bradlaugh abandoned ‘discretion’ and openly challenged censorship laws, even telling police and local magistrates where and when they would be selling the pamphlet.

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Pat Wall: Selected Writings and Speeches of a Socialist MP and Workers’ Leader

Edited by Iain Dalton

Published by Mentmore Press, 2024, £12

Reviewed by Dave Nellist

Iain Dalton has done an important service by bringing together key articles and speeches to celebrate the life and work of Militant MP Pat Wall and his contribution to building the movement for the socialist transformation of society.

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Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-14

By Ralph Darlington

Published by Pluto Press, 2023, £19.99

Reviewed by Iain Dalton

In the years 1910-14 Britain experienced its biggest wave of strikes by trade unions up to that point – 3,000, with 1,200 strikes in 1913 alone. These included national strikes amongst rail workers and miners, as well as many large regional and local strikes. Many of these strikes were not officially called by trade unions, but were unofficial strikes started from below.

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I read with interest Pete Dickenson’s article, A New COP Climate Deadlock Looms (Socialism Today, issue No.282, November 2024). He rightly talks about the controversy regarding CO2 emissions and the reluctance of capitalist governments to challenge the powerful oil industry. Towards the end of the article he says that another highly controversial issue could feature at COP29, that of livestock emissions. He then states that “methane emissions from cattle are major drivers of global warming, since methane is up to a hundred times more damaging than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas [….] and ending livestock rearing would make a major contribution to tackling climate change”.

The controversy that Pete is rightly concerned about is how a policy of ending livestock would be implemented globally in a fair and just way. However, many people, including scientists, would find his statement itself as controversial.

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“It is time to study Caligula. That most notorious of Roman emperors killed what was left of the republic and centralised authority in himself. Donald Trump does not need to make his horse a senator; it will be enough to keep appointing charlatans to America’s great offices of state. Rome was not destroyed by outsiders. Its demolition was the work of barbarians from within… To judge from what Trump has done within a fortnight of winning the presidency, his path is destruction”.

This was the gloomy prognosis of the Financial Times US editor, Edward Luce, writing on 19 November 2024. Others, including Donald Trump’s own former chief of staff, retired Marine General John Kelly, have described Trump as a fascist. Large sections of the capitalist class are obviously dreading the consequences of Trump’s second term in the White House. Millions of working-class Americans feel the same, but the reasons for their trepidation are very different.

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Still dazed and disoriented from July’s general election humiliation, the Tories have a new leader, Kemi Badenoch – product of yet another leadership election fiasco. Surrounding her is a Conservative and Unionist Party – once capitalism’s electoral vehicle par excellence – that has haemorrhaged votes, seats, staff, members, and business engagement. It is unable to resolve its all-sided war of interconnected factions. Nor can it draw a line under 14 years of tumbling living standards, failed infrastructure, economic decline, instability and scandal. 

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Since 2010-11, councils have made cuts to local services of a huge £24.5 billion. They spent 42% less on services in 2022-23 than if spending had kept pace with cost and demand pressures since 2010-11.

Most cuts have come from Labour councils passing on Tory austerity without a serious challenge. Without an organised trade-union and community-based resistance, Starmer’s government brings no hope of the trend being reversed. Things are about to get far worse.

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Before the election Labour was clear about its aim of boosting investment – particularly in ‘infrastructure’ such as housing – while restricting day-to-day public spending. The manifesto emphasised ‘derisking’ private investment, ensuring profits for big capital, with public money used to subsidise institutional investors. Britain’s long-term low-level of investment was blamed on government not being helpful enough to business. House building was to increase to levels not seen since the 1970s, but unlike then not through state investment in secure low-rent council homes. 

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As this edition was being prepared the sad news came through of the death, on November 15, of Lynn Walsh, the founding editor of our magazine. Lynn was appointed by the Socialist Party’s executive committee as the editor of Socialism Today from its inaugural edition published in September 1995. He continued in that role until declining health led him to stand down in May 2019.

Lynn was a polymath of the Marxist movement and in future editions we will reprint some of his outstanding contributions to its ideas. This will be an integral part of our celebration in 2025 of thirty years of the magazine he did so much to sustain.

We start here by republishing an article written by Lynn for the first issue of Socialism Today, our founding statement, arguing that socialism was far from being ‘finished’, as was the ‘established wisdom’ of the 1990s even amongst those on the left.

The intervening years have filled out processes more tentatively identified in 1995, not least the qualitative transmutation of the Social Democratic and Labour parties into capitalist formations, and introduced new features. China in 1995, for example, was just the eighth biggest economy in the world not the power second only to US imperialism that it is today.

But the article, written in Lynn’s usual systematic-analytic style, still remains as a compelling case for why socialism will once again become the idea that guides workers and youth in the struggle for a new society. The most fitting tribute possible to one of the pioneers.

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