Yet again a private rail franchise, this time Southeastern, has been shown to have its hands in the till, as “errors” meant that £25 million of public money was not returned to the government... seven years after it was due. As a result of this “serious breach” of the franchise agreement, the...
Keir Starmer’s Blair tribute act is promoted as the way to win elections. It is not. “Mainstream” social democracy has done badly for decades in elections, as well as in bringing social progress. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the French Socialist Party was the strongest party in France, with 37.5% of the first-round vote for the National Assembly in 1981, and 49.3% in the second round. Even in 1997, it had 23.5%. In 2017, it was down to 7.4%. The Labour Party in the Netherlands was in government most of the time from 1946 to 2002. Its vote share has gone down from 29.0% in 1998 to 5.7% in 2021...
On 4-5 October, workers at the Royal College of Art struck in support of their long running campaign against casualised working conditions. 90% of staff are employed on “zero hours” and other forms of insecure contracts — the highest percentage of such employment in UK Higher Education. Strikes are scheduled for the next three weeks . RCA strikers will take heart from the important recent win at Open University, where 4,000 Associate Lecturers won significant improvements in their (fixed-term) contracts, including a pay rise and payments for all work. At Goldsmiths in south London, staff are...
The fuel shortages, queues at petrol stations and huge surrounding traffic jams which have choked up many cities and towns are an indictment of many aspects of our social arrangements: • Low-wages and terrible conditions for HGV drivers. • The ending of free movement between Britain and the European Union with Brexit, and the wider drive against migrants. • The whole framework of vital industries, including transport and energy, being run for private profit. The Socialist of 29 September carries an interview with a Socialist Party member who until recently worked as a driver. He vividly...
On 15 September, the Australian, UK and US governments announced AUKUS – a pact to share and jointly develop military technology, and to deepen military coordination in the so-called “Indo-Pacific” ocean region. Though this was officially unstated, and even tokenistically denied by Boris Johnson, the pact is universally understood as a move to counter and contain China. Submarines The most prominently-advertised of the pact’s initial actions will be to equip Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines – taking the place of a now-scrapped deal in which a French manufacturer was set to...
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