Britain

“Attending this conference and its fringe meetings has indicated a change in mood. Derek Simpson has said that he wants to return Amicus to where it belongs that is in the hands of the membership, not as an extended hand of the multinationals. Activists in the union have to make sure that this is carried out in practice.”

The new Health Minister Patricia Hewitt has just announced that the government is to stump up £3 billion extra for operations. Good news? Not entirely – the entire wad is to be passed over to the private sector.

The establishment of the Premier League in Britain, a renaming of the old First Division, in the early 1990s opened up a period of naked commercial exploitation of football. The new league exists to maximise the profits and commercial potential of the richest clubs at the expense of the rest. Central to this are clubs like Manchester United, the world’s richest club which has now been virtually bought up by US tycoon Malcolm Glazier, who has grabbed control of over 75% of the club’s shares.

Over the past weekend the Annual National Conference of the 67,000 strong college and university lecturers union, NATFHE, which took place in Eastbourne, Britain, unanimously agreed to support the Bolivarian revolution and the measures that it has taken to help the workers and poor in Venezuela.

This resolution was unanimously passed by the Central London Branch of the National Union of Journalists in a meeting held on May 12.

As a postscript to British Perspectives 2005 (What is happening in Britain) Phil Mitchinson analyses the results of the recent general election in the context of mounting insecurity in the British economy, politics and society as a whole. Labour won the election with the smallest share of the vote of any victorious party in history. With the government's majority severely reduced how much longer can Blair last? 'New' Labour has set off on a collision course with its own backbenches and with the trade unions and the working class.


Labour has won an historic third term victory in the 2005 General Election, yet there will be no dancing in the streets, no street parties, in fact little enthusiasm at all. The combination of widespread opposition to the war in Iraq, distrust of Blair, and disillusionment with the failures of the last two terms of Labour government means that Labour won the election with the lowest share of the vote, just 36 percent, of any victorious party in history.

 

We recently published a review of a film shown on the BBC entitled Faith which wove together the lives of its fictional characters with the real events of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike. The result was a moving drama and an unusually honest account of this great struggle, sympathetic to the miners and their communities. The film’s director, David Thacker spoke to us about the making of the film and his own political views.

Mick Brooks looks at the historical background to the British car industry and in particular that of Rover. It is a history of decline, of underinvestment, and finally of collapse. Now all the attempts to save Rover by looking for private buyers have failed. It is a reflection of the decline of the British capitalist class as a whole.

The closure of Rover involves the loss of 26,000 jobs, in the plant and the industries that supply it. The present owners were called in to “save” jobs. All they have done is siphoned off millions for themselves. The only answer is nationalisation under workers’ control.

The state of the world economy, the USA, China, the disastrous war in Iraq, all have a direct effect on the situation in Britain. Some may find a contradiction in the fact that although Blair is very unpopular he will almost certainly win the elections. The fact is that there is no alternative. The workers of Britain have not forgotten what the Tories did when they were in power. But the undercurrents are already discernable and these will sooner or later come to the surface.

The media have just finished celebrating the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. We would like to remind our readers of an important event that took place around the same time, the Neath by-election on 15th May 1945. For the first time in Britain, a Trotskyist party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, contested a Parliamentary election. The seat was solid Labour, but the vote for the RCP was significant. Even more significant was the way the party was able to link up with the most advanced workers and youth.