National News
No more support for fascists in Kiev!
by New Worker correspondent
LONDON communists, along with many other anti-fascists, called for solidarity with the people of the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics in the heart of the capital on Saturday.
Twenty or more demonstrators including NCP leader Andy Brooks joined the picket opposite Downing Street called by the New Communist Party (NCP), Socialist fight and the British Posadist movement, and supported by the Solidarity with the Anti-Fascist Resistance in Ukraine (SARU) campaign.
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What does Bolton want?
Sputnik
US National Security Adviser John Bolton arrived in London this week for talks, during which he is expected to urge Britain to toughen its stance on Iran and the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei. As Britain prepares to leave the European Union (EU) on 31st October, many diplomats expect London to become increasingly reliant on the USA.
Dr Tara McCormack, a political commentator and lecturer in international relations at the University of Leicester, gives her views on the significance of the US national security adviser’s visit.
Sputnik: US National Secretary Adviser John Bolton has arrived in London for talks during which he is expected to urge Britain to toughen its stance on Iran and Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei. How significant is this visit by John Bolton to Britain?
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On the shop floor
by New Worker correspondent
WORKERS at the giant American-owned supermarket chain Asda are being forced to sign a “flexible contract” that means they will no longer be paid for any breaks and will be forced to work bank holidays and weekends. Failure to do so will result in the sack in early November.
According to the GMB union, who represent many such workers, this will force many, especially those with caring responsibilities, to collect their P45s.
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Museum News
by New Worker correspondent
WORKERS at the Museum of London and the city’s Docklands Museum have had a below-inflation pay rise imposed by Britain’s richest local authority, the Corporation of the City of London. Trade union Prospect is to ballot its members at the Museum over the 1.5 per cent rise.
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Troubles on the Slipways
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
THE SCOTTISH National Party (SNP) government is contemplating nationalising a major industrial asset. This does not herald a socialist dawn, however, it is merely to bail out one of its own former supporters. The asset in question is the Port Glasgow shipyard Ferguson Marine Engineering Limited (FMEL) that is owned by one-time SNP supporter Jim McCall, who remains a member of the SNP government’s Council of Economic Advisors despite him losing faith.
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Labour Battles
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
Whenever the two people in the Labour Party disagree over whether a tax rate should be 20.0 or 20.5 per cent the bourgeois press likes to announce there is an irreparable split that will destroy the party forever.
That said, Scottish Labour has not had its troubles to seek recently. Former Labour Minister Margaret Curran recently observed that: “We are not terribly relevant. We are not saying relevant things at the moment.” Adding that “I think we have to accept we are not that powerful party any more. We have no right to it. We have to earn that right again.”
Which is stating the obvious, given that at the last electoral test, in the unnecessary Euro elections, Labour came fifth with nine per cent, which is just enough to save a deposit in a parliamentary election. Labour MSPs sometimes made effective criticisms of the many SNP failings at Holyrood but the SNP sail on regardless.
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Freedom for Bahrain!
by New Worker correspondent
Protesters calling on Britain to end its support of the brutal, feudal dictatorship in the Persian Gulf, were out in central London last weekend. The picket was called by the Bahrain Freedom Movement, one of the major forces in the underground movement in the oil-rich island that was once a British protectorate.
Marx through the eyes of his daughter
reviewed
by Ben Soton
Eleanor Marx: A Life by Rachel Holmes. Bloomsbury Publishing, London.
(2014) Hardback: 528pp; £22.50; ISBN: 9780747583844
(2015) EPUB/MOBI eBook (Watermarked): 528pp; £12.47; ISBN: 9781408843239
(2015) Hardback: 528pp; £22.50; ISBN: 9781620409701
(2015) Paperback: 528pp; £11.69; ISBN: 81408852897
ELEANOR MARX: A Life is part of the history of the Marx family covering contemporary events through the eyes of his youngest daughter and contains plenty of useful information about the 19th Century. It goes into detail about both the Marx and the Westphalen (her mother’s maiden name) families, her parents’ courtship and her father’s friendship with Engels.
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International News
When the Devil came down from the sky
by Ed Newman
ON 9th August 1945, the government of the USA, then headed by President Harry S Truman, dropped a plutonium atomic bomb over Nagasaki, which instantly killed no less than 70,000 men, women and children and condemned to death tens of thousands more over the subsequent years.
It was a crime against humanity that was absolutely unnecessary because only three days earlier the city of Hiroshima had been erased from the map by another atomic bomb, this time made up of uranium. This atomic device burned to ashes over 140,000 people in a matter of seconds.
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Clamp down on riots in Hong Kong with law
People’s Daily (Beijing)
ANY ATTEMPT to endanger national sovereignty and security, challenge the power of the central government and the authority of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, or use Hong Kong to carry out infiltration and sabotage activities against the mainland is an act that crosses the red line, and is absolutely impermissible, said Chinese President Xi Jinping at the meeting celebrating the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to the motherland.
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Iranians call on world to back Palestine
THE LEADER of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says the “Deal of the Century” that is yet to be unveiled by the USA is a crime against humanity, urging the international community to help defeat it.
“The ploy of the Deal of the Century, which is being plotted by the oppressive America and its treacherous cohorts is a crime against human society, and not just the Palestinian nation,” the Leader said last Saturday in his annual Hajj message.
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Lots of questions, few answers about sexual predator Epstein’s suicide
by Mark Gruenberg
THERE ARE lots of questions and not many answers, so far, about the suicide of serial sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein in the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan on 10th August. And the conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death are already starting to swirl.
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I wanna hold your Hànội!
by Paul Kennedy
ON 5th October 1962 a new boy-band from Liverpool released their first song. It was called Love me do and it peaked in the UK charts at number 17, a moderate success. Their second song, Please, please me, did a little better and the rest, as they say, is history.
The group was the Beatles, who went on to become the biggest band in the world. The Fab Four, as they were affectionately known, changed popular music forever.
fifty-seven years later and more than 9,000 km away from the city of Liverpool, the music of the Beatles is as popular now at Tranquil Books & Coffee in Việtnam’s capital city as it was in the Cavern Club, the venue the Beatles regularly played in the northwest of England back in the early sixties.
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Features
Using hunger as a weapon
by Arnold August
A SHIP containing 25,000 tons of soy products that was in the Panama Canal heading to Venezuela was just seized due to the US blockade. The USA is using hunger as a weapon.
So declared Cuban President Díaz-Canel in his 28th July speech at the Foro de SÃo Paolo in Caracas. It is not the first time that Cuba, through its leaders and revolutionary press, has made such an affirmation. Furthermore, in a modest and unassuming way, so has Venezuela. No doubt similar declarations will be made in the future. The fate of Venezuela is still being played out, even though the Bolivarian Revolution and its President, Nicolas Maduro, have defeated every single attempt by the USA and by Venezuela’s external and internal enemies to overthrow the government.
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The Great Patriotic War
by Rob Gowland
THERE WAS an anniversary in June that passed without a flicker of recognition from our politicians or media. And not the anniversary of D-Day — they were all over that one, thank you. No, the anniversary I am talking about was of the event that changed the character of the Second World War, sealed the doom of Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’ and — after a tremendous struggle ? saved humanity from fascist enslavement.
It was, of course, the invasion of the Soviet Union, on 22nd June 1941, by Hitler’s hitherto unstoppable Wehrmacht.
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