Europe

Last year's strike at the Russian Ford plant marked an important turning point for the Russian labour movement. The Russian economy is growing and this has strengthened sections of the working class. With this growing strength comes a militant mood. At some point this will lead to a wider movement of the Russian working class and with it will come important political repercussions.

How do you lose £3.7 billion? Down the back of the sofa? Meet Jérôme Kerviel. He lost £3.7 billion of his employer’s money, Société Générale, a French bank. Is it actually a good argument for capitalism that the whole world can be screwed up because of a solitary rogue trader? Is the system really so precarious that one crook can send world financial markets into freefall?

"The London police on strike. After that, anything can happen", said Sylvia Pankhurst in 1918. The ground is certainly shifting in Britain. There has been a continual build up of public anger at the government's attempt to impose a 2% limit on public sector pay. The Police are getting a paltry 1.9% rise, in effect a pay cut. They were furious and making all kinds of threats against the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown.

New Labour fears that if Northern Rock collapses large sectors of the financial system could follow. And that would reverberate throughout the economy. Recession is on its way. A financial collapse could be the trigger. The right thing to do is nationalise Northern Rock, and with it take over the whole banking system.

Since 1979 UK child poverty has doubled. In 2006, 3.8 million children were living in poverty in homes on less than 60% of average income. Although this is a fall of about 600,000 since 1998, this still leaves 500,000 children above the Government's own target. This is not the whole picture either - poverty in the whole population is increasing.

Towards the end of last year we witnessed the collapse of another attempt to create a party to the left of Labour. The RESPECT party, which was founded in 2004, was the latest effort to establish an electoral alternative to Labour. It succeeded in winning an MP, George Galloway, as well as a few dozen councillors up and down the country. However, the whole project soon went pear-shaped.

Tommy Sheridan is facing yet another fight in his colourful career as Scotland's best known socialist. He has been arrested on suspicion of perjury arising from his widely publicised defamation case against the News of the World for which he was awarded £200,000 damages.

It is fashionable today among some on the left to refer to some golden age of "old labour". They use this to argue that in the past it was a workers' party but now it is no longer. The Blairites on the other hand claim that the party was too "left-wing" to be elected. But there has never been such a golden age. If you look at the record of Labour governments, they have all been responsible for cutting living standards and carrying out an imperialist foreign policy.

Andrew Glyn died from a brain tumour on 22 December 2007.  He was 64 years old.  A fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford since 1969, he was a leading socialist economist for all that time.

In 1970, just like today, the Labour Party seemed dead from the neck up. After six years of desperately disappointing government, Labour had been unceremoniously bundled out of office. The Tories were back, aiming to put the boot in to the working class.

The process of capitalist restoration in Serbia has been brutal. Hundreds of thousands of workers in the old industries have lost their jobs. The old social buffers provided by the planned economy have been dismantled. In this atmosphere a sombre mood dominates the working class. The only outlet the ruling class can offer is to keep whipping up nationalist sentiment.

Yesterday a powerful general strike shook Greece. There was a massive turnout and the whole of Greece was brought to a standstill. The New Democracy government is attempting to introduce severe cuts in the pension system. All they have achieved is a massive radicalisation of society.

The strike at the Ford plant in St. Petersburg is extremely symptomatic. After the collapse of the Russian economy in the 1990s now we have an upturn. With it comes also a renewed confidence of the working class. The victory of the Russian Ford workers would strengthen enormously the whole of the Russian working class. They need your help.

Over 150 years ago Ireland lost a staggering 13% of its population to death by disease and starvation. How could it be that Britain, which was still the richest and most powerful country in the world, could not prevent this horrific death toll? The answer is simple ‑ the British ruling-classes did not want to minimize the death toll, on the contrary, they welcomed it!

At the University of East Anglia recently Rob Sewell of the Socialist Appeal gave a talk on the Miners strike in Britain 1984-5. The strike was a culmination of the inevitable build up of tension between the ruling and working class. In the post-war period the decline of British imperialism had occured. The Tories of the 1980s were a rabid reaction to that phenomenon, determined to destroy the organised labour movement by taking on its most militant section, the National Union of Miners.