Workers' Liberty 31, May 1996

Strikers playing football against the police. Oxbridge undergraduates and retired army officers running the trains and trams. The Australian and English cricket teams carrying on the Test matches regardless. Dames and debutantes peeling potatoes in Hyde Park. The "stake in the country" people mucking in to keep things going. Thus is the image of the British General Strike of 70 years ago this month which the establishment has passed down to posterity - a very British affair; one which was sensible enough to refrain from disrupting the hallowed British way of life. And this image contains...

The social-democratic governments in Australia and Spain have lost office this year, after 14 years governing Spain and 13 years in Australia. France’s 14 years of a Socialist Party president – ten of them with a Socialist prime minister too – ended in 1995. Tony Blair and his group see these social democracies, Australia’s especially, as a model for their New Labour. Yet in all these countries the working class and the labour movement are worse off than they were before the long period of social-democratic rule. Social-democratic governments have always turned against militant workers. They...