Solidarity 149, 8 April 2009

“We done what we had to do, we have a message for big multinational corporations: you can’t get away with it no more. You should treat ordinary people with respect. And it’s not us that should be treated as criminals but people like Mandelson.” Kevin Nolan, Unite convenor from the occupied Visteon car parts factory in Enfield, was speaking outside the High Court on Monday 6 April. He and the deputy convenor, Piers Hood, had gone to the court in the morning facing imprisonment for defying an eviction notice brought on behalf of Visteon against the workers occupying their former workplace in...

Any working-class person who looked to the capitalist world leaders for protection against the economic and social catastrophe that looms before us all will be disappointed. The G20 economic summit in London on 2 April was a triumph for the spin-doctors rather than the economists. Even Tory papers were full of praise: "The fightback starts here", said the Daily Telegraph. The Daily Mail had the same headline as the Guardian: "Brown's New World Order". El Mundo, in Spain, hailed a "global Marshall Plan", a new version of the huge US aid package of 1948-52 which (together with the Korean war...