Symptoms are the physical signs of an underlying problem. At the moment the Irish economy has a series of symptoms which would send the average doctor fleeing to the hills. But according to the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, everything is stable and the economy is fine thank you very much. Of course Mr Lenihan’s analysis was designed for the press and to settle the nerves of the international speculators.

The overwhelming majority of French people are against the so-called pension reform of the Sarkozy government. This was made abundantly clear in yesterday’s mass demonstrations. But what can be done to transform this opposition into an all-out movement to stop the government?

The Labour leadership election contest will be ending in September as the ballot papers finally go out. It could have been an opportunity to discuss a balance-sheet of the right-wing control of the party under New Labour and an opportunity to discuss a socialist programme in face of the worst capitalist crisis since the 1930s. However, the contest has left most people cold.

Last night I received an email from Petersburg informing me of the death of comrade Vladimir Morozov, who passed away on August 24. This news was a terrible blow. Vladimir, or Volodya as he was known to his friends, was a key figure in the ranks of the supporters of the International Marxist Tendency in Russia.

A ban on trade union donations to the Labour Party will not benefit anyone other than the enemies of the working class and the organised working class in particular.

The Green Party leader John Gormley has announced that the ban is to be introduced, alongside a ban on corporate donations, so much for the Green Party’s veneer of radicalism. This “radicalism” has become very stale and particularly mouldy also. Of course the proposed legislation is designed to appear even handed.

Recently we reported on the vote of the public sector unions to back the Croke Park Deal. We argued that despite the apparent victory of the ideas of “Social Partnership” as espoused by Peter McLoone and David Begg; under the present conditions it would be extremely difficult for any deal to be brokered that was worth the paper it was written on.

When David Cameron announced "The Big Society" (a name nicked from the American President Lyndon B. Johnson who used it in the '60s) during the election, most people laughed and assumed that would be the last we would hear of it. Tory spokespeople said that they had no idea what it meant and one Tory MP described it as "Bollocks." Indeed. However, now safely inside Number 10, Cameron has brought up it up again.

There’s been a steady procession of attacks on the public sector over the last couple of years. Wage cuts, levies and a deluge of propaganda. We’ve made the point elsewhere that the FF and the Greens are in a cul de sac, they are most likely going to be slaughtered in the next general election. So by all accounts they have nothing to lose. They have launched a one sided civil war against the working class at the behest of the bourgeois, the home grown variety of course, but also the multi nationals based in London and New York.

Journalists usually refer to August as the silly season. It is in that context that we have the latest madcap idea to come from the Con-Dem coalition. According to plans leaked by the Guardian newspaper, council housing tenancies will no longer be ‘for life.’

Today 6th August is the 20th anniversary of the death of Marxist MP and class fighter Pat Wall. In his memory we publish a tribute to him by Rob Sewell.

The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) was set up in France, supposedly as an alternative to both the Communist and Socialist parties. The leaders of these two parties had shifted more and more towards market orientated policies. In reality the leadership of the NPA also suffer from the same illness, in that they believe that in order to be successful on the electoral front they must tone down the Communist and revolutionary content of this new party. That is not what many genuine revolutionary militants were expecting from the NPA.

Sarkozy lost his glossy image some time ago. But now he is exposed in the eyes of all. After all his bragging about his own extravagant lifestyle, he is attacking the living standards of pensioners, workers, students and the unemployed. The mood in France is an angry one. If the leaders of the left and the trade unions were to mobilise the workers, this government could be brought down relatively easy.

We conclude Dan Morley's three part study of the crisis inside UK housing.

Capitalism could only expand (and in a very chaotic, unbalanced, top-heavy fashion) the national housing stock through an enormous speculative bubble which only stored up greater problems for today. Now we find ourselves in the farcical situation of having a desperate, long-term housing shortage, and at the same time hundreds of thousands of unemployed construction workers, idle land and idle brick factories etc.

The question of housing in Britain today reveals much about the character of the crisis that permeates our entire society. Through the medium of housing we can see almost every problem our society faces - from inequality to out of control speculation, health problems to overcrowding, groaning infrastructures to gross regional imbalances and distortions.