National News
Cameron come-back — no thanks says Sheffield prof
Sputnik
Former Prime Minister (PM), David Cameron, has reportedly told friends he is mulling a return to front-line politics and fancies being Britain’s new Foreign Secretary. Sputnik spoke about it to Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting at the University of Sheffield
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Libraries at risk
by New Worker correspondent
LAST Saturday hundreds of people marched from the British Library on the Euston Road down to a rally at Parliament Square demanding an end to the cuts hitting the arts and libraries across the country. Since 2010 over 500 libraries have been closed across England, Scotland and Wales.
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Living Wage struggles
by New Worker correspondent
OUTSOURCED workers at Luton Airport are demanding that their ultimate employer, Luton council, intervenes to ensure that they are paid in line with the real living wage.
Cleaners employed by the German firm Sasse AG and workers employed by Clece Care Services, who help passengers with mobility difficulties, are fighting for the living wage rate of £9.00 an hour. Last week workers staged a protest outside the town hall to insist that the airport’s contractors pay up.
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More jobs go in Dundee
by New Worker correspondent
SOME 850 jobs are to go as a result of French multinational Michelin announcing on Monday it is to close its tyre factory in Dundee in two years’ time. It is the city’s largest industrial employer and three years ago made much of investing £50million in new machinery
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High Street blues
by New Worker correspondent
FOLLOWING ON from the collapse of Poundworld, Maplin, House of Fraser and other retailers the crisis on the high street shows every sign of deepening and is probably heralding a major and prolonged recession.
In the past the retail sector’s rapid expansion was seen as creating new jobs to cope with the decline of the traditional manufacturing industry and later cutbacks in the public sector. This year 120,000 jobs have been lost in the retail sector.
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Arrests over Grenfell Tower effigy bonfire
Sputnik
fiVE men have been arrested on suspicion of disrupting public order after posting a video featuring a cardboard model of London’s Grenfell Tower being burned.
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Scottish Political News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
Local Hospital War
LAST WEEK this page was entirely taken up with health matters but we have to make a return to such a concern.
A fierce political battle is taking place in North Lanarkshire, with the location of a new hospital, perhaps only incidentally, as the battleground.
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Mountain Rescue
Mountain rescue teams in Scotland have claimed that volunteers have had their lives put at risk by a lack of support from government agencies.
Teams from Glencoe, Tayside, Lochaber and the Cairngorms have deplored the actions of search-and-rescue helicopter teams overseen by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), which have often repeatedly refused to assist in recovering dead bodies from the mountains
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SNP Splits Showing
Splits are emerging within the SNP over their views on Brexit. Perthshire MP Pete Wishart has broken ranks and daringly attacked his leader by saying that the misnamed “people’s vote” on Brexit could present “all sorts of risks to a future independence referendum, for nothing”. He wisely points out that it is more difficult to resist calls for a similar confirmatory ballot in Scotland if nationalists were to win another referendum on independence.
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Remembering a comrade
by New Worker correspondent
COMRADES AND friends gathered at the India Club in London’s West End last weekend for a memorial dinner for Neil Harris, a leading member of the New Communist Party who spent many happy times in its bar and restaurant.
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Korean solidarity in Belfast
by New Worker correspondent
IRISH supporters of Democratic Korea met in Belfast last month to hear Dermot Hudson of the UK Korean Friendship Association (KFA) talk about his recent visit to north Korea and discuss future solidarity work in the north of Ireland.
The struggle for Korean reunification and the role of US imperialism came up during the discussion that followed. Inevitably comparisons were made between the division of Korea and the partition of Ireland by imperialism.
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What next for Labour?
by New Worker correspondent
WHAT’S THE FUTURE for Labour was the question posed by a panel of speakers at a New Worker meeting in central London last week. Gerry Downing of Socialist fight who was expelled by Labour on trumped-up charges of ‘anti-Semitism’, and Marie Lynam, a Posadist who is a Labour Party activist and supporter of the Labour Representation Committee, both spoke at the meeting, chaired by NCP leader Andy Brooks, at the Calthorpe Arms in the Gray’s Inn Road.
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MUSIC REVIEW Not ordinary lives
by Ben Soton
Ordinary Giants/Robb Johnson A Life & Times 1918—2018. Irregular Records, 2018. Distribution by Discovery; £18.33.
ORDINARY GIANTS is a collection of music compiled Robb Johnson, consisting of three CDs each covering a different period. Part one covers the period from 1918 to 1939, part two from 1940 to 1969, and part three from 1970 to 2018. The collection is both a tribute to his father Ron and at the same time an oral history of Britain from the first World
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International News
Moving inexorably towards war?
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey-Pravda.ru
WHO WOULD have thought that in 2018 we would be closer to war than we were in 1958, 60 years ago?
In 1958 the world was divided into three geo-political blocs, namely the Soviet Union and its area of influence, countries liberated from the scourge of fascism and countries liberated from the scourge of imperialist tyranny, being held down for centuries by European nations that saw their industries grow fat on the back of slavery. These were the same countries that, after hundreds of years of imperialist domination, left appalling literacy rates behind.
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Massive support for Cuba at UN
by Pavel Jacomino Radio Havana Cuba
LAST WEEK the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a Cuban-sponsored resolution on ending the blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba.
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Grim future for Merkel
Sputnik
FOLLOWING the Christian Democrats’ (CDU) shortcomings in Hesse’s regional elections and the historically poor results of the CSU, its sister party in Bavaria, Angela Merkel has announced that she will give up the party leadership. She also stated that she wouldn’t seek political office during the next national vote in 2021.
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25 years in jail for Catalan leaders?
by Pavel Jacomino Radio Havana Cuba
SPANISH prosecutors are calling for Catalan nationalist leaders to be jailed for up to 25 years on charges of rebellion or misuse of public funds over last year’s failed secession bid.
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Features
Britain needs better bus services not US-style identity politics
by Neil Clark Sputnik
ELITE INTERESTS want us to focus not on ‘bread and butter’ economic issues but on fighting vituperative culture wars, which create much social division but maintain the neo-liberal status quo.
Halloween never used to be that big an occasion when I was a child growing up in Britain in the 1970s but that’s certainly not the case now. It’s not the only scary thing we’ve imported from across the Pond.
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Lessons of the Paris and Shanghai communes
by Deirdre Griswold Workers World (US)
LATELY, great interest and support for the idea of socialism has developed in the USA, especially amongst the younger generations — a marked departure from the fearful and stultifying days of red baiting ushered in by the Cold War of world imperialism against the then-existing bloc of countries trying to build socialism. But how can socialism be achieved?
The Paris Commune of 1871 and the Shanghai Commune of 1927 briefly showed the world what workers’ governments might look like.
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