New Worker Banner

The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Lead story

Climate crisis can’t be ignored

by New Worker correspondent

CLIMATE CHANGE activists are disrupting traffic and public transport throughout central London this week to demand action to halt ecological disaster. They’ve been denounced by Tory ministers and business leaders for causing chaos and disrupting business, but Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, Caroline Lucas the Green MP, and Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich, have all publicly supported the protests.

Read the full story here >> Climate crisis can’t be ignored

Divide and Rule

by New Worker correspondent

A LONG-RUNNING pay dispute involving 72 Lincolnshire health visitors is hotting up, they are being balloted for strike action with their county council bosses attempting to ‘divide and rule’ over future job roles.

Unite said the new ballot would not only involve the health visitors who have been denied legitimate pay rises by the council since October 2017, but also health visitors on the lower grade 9 and higher grade 10.

Read the full story here >> Divide and Rule

A Busy Weekend

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

Shifting the Balance between Capital and Labour was the title of the Scottish Morning Star Autumn Conference held at the Scottish TUC on Sunday.

Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard opened proceedings by deploring a litany of Scottish National Party (SNP) sins ranging from them attempting in August to prevent the publication by Scotland’s biggest Sunday newspaper of photographs of pictures showing a prison inmate being dragged by guards just before his death to voting the previous week against Labour’s attempt in Holyrood to effectively nationalise Scotland’s railways.

Read the full story here >> A Busy Weekend

Editorial

Never trust imperialism

WE’RE TOLD that Lord Palmerston was the first to say that Britain had no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests. Whether the famed Victorian imperialist was really the first to say it only concerns historians these days. It certainly reflects the thinking of the Renaissance princes that Machiavelli so admired and it probably goes back to Roman days. The days of the British Empire that spanned the world are long gone but Palmerston’s doctrine lives on in Washington, the beating heart of US imperialism.

The Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara, once said that “you can never trust imperialism, not even for the least thing, absolutely nothing”. That was back in 1964. Sadly many leaders of the liberation movements that broke the chains of colonialism fell for the false promises of American ‘assistance’ and Western ‘aid’ that simply exchanged one form of colonial rule with another.

Some sold out to serve imperialism and line their own pockets at the same time. Those who refused to bend the knee were deposed like Sukarno of Indonesia or assassinated like Lumumba in the Congo. Genuine assistance came only from the Soviet Union, People’s China and the other people’s democracies, which has enabled some of the non-aligned forces that continue to rely on the masses for support to maintain their independence and socialist alignment.

Read the full story here >> Never trust imperialism