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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Lead story

Beyond the US election: class struggle!

by John Catalinotto

WHAT MAKES this American election unique is that it has become an arena for class struggle.

Voting is still dominated by big capital. No party with any chance of winning represents the real interests of working people. The Republicans and Democrats both serve a tiny elite of billionaires. They both use police at home and the Pentagon abroad to maintain the dominance of that class.

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Aerospace battles

by New Worker correspondent

BETWEEN July 1985 and April 1987 the Lancashire town of Barnoldswick was the scene of the longest strike in British history when members of the Furniture, Timber and Allied Trades Union employed at the local bed and mattress factory owned by Silentnight downed tools in a dispute originally over productivity.

Today, at the town’s largest employer, Rolls-Royce workers are gearing up for another dispute. This time it is in opposition to plans announced in August to offshore production of its Trent Engine blades, which are made at Barnoldswick, to a factory in Singapore, with the loss of around 350 jobs

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Editorial

Nationalisation and Socialism

THE WELCOME news that the Welsh railways are to return to public ownership has fired demands for similar action in the rest of the UK to secure passenger services and protect jobs in an industry badly hit by the coronavirus crisis.

The Labour-led Welsh government has used its powers to appoint a public “operator of last resort” to run rail services as a result of the private contractor’s failure to meet its obligations due to the massive drop in passenger numbers during the lockdown.

The move was welcomed by the rail unions and the We Own It campaign that was launched in 2013 to make the case for public ownership. Campaigns officer Pascale Robinson said the Welsh move was “a great step forward”.

She said: “Privatisation just means you pay more for your rail service in profits and today shows you can only keep that up for so long. Publicly owned rail networks have been shown to work. The East Coast Line, after being brought into public ownership, is the most efficient service in the UK. We hope that the rest of the UK follows.”

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