Lead story

Labour must listen to the workers

by Daphne Liddle

OPINION polls trying to predict the outcome of May’s general election are changing daily. Right now the average of all the recent polls put Labour ahead by just one point with 34 per cent of support while the Tories have 33 per cent.

This would give a hung Parliament with Labour leading but short of a majority by 18 per cent.

With the Tories promising more drastic Government spending cuts — 30 per cent according to the Tories but 70 per according to Labour — it is astonishing that the Tories have any support above one per cent because such cuts can only bring further pain, hardship and destitution to the 99 per cent who are not part of the very rich elite.

Unfortunately Labour’s biggest enemy is within its own ranks — the party professionals who are totally out of touch with the needs of the working class that created the party that the policies they come up with differ so little from those of the Tories.

Labour promise to get rid of the “bedroom tax” and to get rid of Department of Work and Pensions targets for benefit sanctions.

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Million Women Rise march

by New Worker correspondent

AN ESTIMATED 3,000 women took part in the Million Women Rise march in London’s West End last Saturday to mark International Women’s Day and to campaign against continuing violence against women.

It was a truly international march strongly supported by women from Africa, southern Asia and the Middle East, many wearing colourful traditional dress.

A group of women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo held a banner proclaiming: “blood in your phone”, referring to British multinational corporations that exploit minerals such as Coltan — used to manufacture microchips for phones and computers — profiting from forced labour and war in the region.

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Editorial

Creeping fascism

CAPITALISM is in deep crisis. It cannot solve the problems of the millions of working people whose labour it exploits but it always seeks to divert the masses to perpetuate its rule. In Britain and throughout Europe we are witnessing the “creeping fascism” of the bourgeoisie who couple their attacks on working class rights and living standards with tactics that seek to scapegoat asylum-seekers, religious and ethnic minorities and immigrants to divide and weaken the working class.

Civil liberties and rights that had been taken for granted for decades are being stripped away as the forces of repression are granted more and more powers of arrest and detention. In the past bourgeois politicians encouraged the bogus theories of personal freedom, bourgeois democracy and the illusions of social-democracy as an alternative to scientific socialism. Now some of them don’t even bother to do that.

James Palumbo, the millionaire merchant banker turned nightclub owner who is a Liberal-Democrat peer in the House of Lords, is now calling for “a new model of democracy” that would see “the country run by experts and business leaders with no party allegiances”.

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