Lead story

Rise in jobless

by Caroline Colebrook

THE NUMBER of people in Britain who are out of work and seeking work rose by 25,000 between April and June according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The jobless total also rose in the three months to May — the first time in two that the figures have risen for two consecutive months.

These figures also hide the hundreds of thousands of people in part-time jobs who desperately need a full-time wage to make ends meet and many, especially women, who want a job but have been forced to give up looking by unaffordable childcare costs and low wages.

It also hides the growing thousands on zero-hours contracts who do not know from one week to another how many hours they will be called on to work or how much pay they will get — and who are deprived of their human rights to sickness and holiday pay.

The biggest fall has been in the number of full-time employed men and young people: unemployment for 18-to-24-year-olds has risen 12,000 to 591,000 (14.3 per cent).

The giant union Unite said the new figures reveal fragile nature of the so-called economic recovery, particularly outside London and the south east.

Unite general secretary Len McCluskey said: “For the first time in two years there have been two consecutive monthly rises in the jobless figures. This is the first crack in the edifice of post-election Tory economic triumphalism.

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Rise in jobless

Polish workers in Britain may strike

POLISH workers in Britain are considering a 24-hour strike in protest at anti-immigrant smears and accusations of being “benefit scroungers” to demonstrate their importance to the British economy.

The proposed date for the unprecedented unofficial walk-out is 20th August and organisational discussions are taking place on internet forums and in the pages of Britain’s largest Polish language newspaper, which is offering tacit support.

More than 500,000 Poles are currently employed in Britain and any concerted action could cause widespread disruption to businesses and services across the country, with the construction, food and health care sectors in particular hit hard.

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Polish workers in Britain may strike

Editorial

No to threat of nuclear war

LAST WEEK millions in Japan and throughout the world paused to remember those who died in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the last days of the Second World War. On 6th August 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and three days later another one on Nagasaki. Some 200,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed instantly in the atomic blasts. Many more would later perish from flash burns and radiation sickness.

The Americans claim it brought a speedy end to the global conflict. But that was always a lie. Hitler was already dead in his bunker when Berlin fell in May 1945. Japan’s oil supplies were cut, its ports blockaded and its main industrial centres were being hammered by day and night aerial bombings. The communist-led resistance in China, Korea and Vietnam had liberated vast tracts of those countries. Finally the Red Army broke the back of the Japanese army when they smashed through Manchuria and Emperor Hirohito was on his knees begging for an armistice when the terrible atomic massacre began.

Dropping the atom bombs was a monstrous war-crime. Two Japanese cities were wiped out to show the world, and the Soviet Union in particular, what the might of US imperialism was capable of doing. The American imperialists believed they had a new weapon that would guarantee their hegemony over the post-war world for decades to come. What they didn’t know and least suspected was that Soviet scientists were also unravelling the secrets of the atom and that the USSR would soon develop atomic weapons to match anything in the imperialist arsenal.

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No to threat of nuclear war