Lead story

Russian missiles rain down on IS

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

RUSSIAN cruise missiles rained down on Raqqa, the terror “capital” in eastern Syria, this week as loyalist forces continue to advance on all fronts in the war against the “Islamic State” (IS) and the other terrorist gunmen who have spread death and destruction across Syria over the past four years. Imperialist war-planes have strafed a Syrian Arab Army position and the Iraqi government has given Turkey an ultimatum to withdraw all Turkish troops from the northern Iraqi Kurdish autonomous region.

On Tuesday the Rostov-on-Don, a Russian submarine operating in the eastern Mediterranean, fired cruise missiles against IS positions near the terrorists’ stronghold in Raqqa. Russian president Vladimir Putin praised the efforts of his navy and said he hoped these weapons would never have to be armed with nuclear warheads in the war against terror.

Meanwhile the Syrian army continues to push the terror gangs back, while other rebels have evacuated the last area held in the city of Homs under a truce negotiated with the Syrian government.

Read the full story here >>

Russian missiles rain down on IS

Government trying to hide scale of NHS winter crisis

LABOUR leader Jeremy Corbyn and health campaigners have accused the Government of reducing the number of bulletins on the state of the NHS.

These bulletins, which have been issued weekly, included full details on the state of how the NHS has been working and achieving targets set under the previous Labour government.

The Department of Health announced its decision to cut the number of these bulletins to just one a month — at the same time as MPs were in the House debating on whether to bomb Syria.

And the content of the bulletins will be reduced. They will no longer include Accident and Emergency (A&E) waiting times, the numbers of last-minute cancelled operations, the number of patients left waiting on trolleys for more than four hours and ambulances kept waiting outside hospitals to hand over their patients.

The change comes after ministers admitted that the official reporting period for the winter had been shortened by a month — further limiting what the public can find out about growing problems in the NHS.

Read the full story here >>

Government trying to hide scale of NHS winter crisis

Our future is socialism!

by New Worker Correspondent

MARX HOUSE was packed on Saturday as delegates and guests gathered for the 18th Congress of the New Communist Party of Britain (NCP). That historic house in Clerkenwell Green, with its memories of Lenin and the Marxist pioneers of the British working class movement, was once again the venue for the NCP’s triennial congress that took place over the first weekend in December.

Read the full story here >>

Our future is socialism!

Editorial

Labour’s broad army

LABOUR candidate Jim McMahon coasted to a comfortable 62 per cent victory in the Oldham West by-election last week — confounding all those right-wing Blairites who predicted that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party would make it unelectable. The threat of a swing to Ukip vanished as traditional Labour voters came home and gave Jim McMahon an increased majority compared with his predecessor, the late Michael Meacher.

Nevertheless the battle inside the Labour Party between the Corbyn supporters and the right-wing Blairites is intensifying over the role of the new organisation Momentum and the position of the thousands of “£3 supporters” who registered last summer to vote for Corbyn as leader but who are a very diverse bunch, including some old-fashioned and dogmatic Trotskyist entryists.

Momentum began as a movement that was intended to act as a bridge between Labour members and the vast army of left-wingers who had been driven out of the party in previous years by the Blairites and those young people on the left who had never yet engaged with the party but who had opposed it so long as it supported privatisation, austerity and wars but who are loosely defined socialists at heart.

But Momentum has struck predictable problems on finding some of its local groups dominated by Trotskyist sects who are set on trying to take over the party. Many existing long-standing members on both the right and the left of the party are resentful that the open structure of the party should give these newcomers real power in determining policy.

Read the full story here >>

Labour’s broad army