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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Lead story

Closing the door after the horse has bolted

by New Worker correspondent

IT IS OFTEN SAID that in Britain it takes a major disaster before anything is done about a known problem. It took 66 deaths at Ibrox football ground in 1971 and for the Bradford football fire to claim 56 lives in 1985 for longstanding problems with overcrowded and decrepit sports venues to receive attention.

Read the full story here >> Closing the door after the horse has bolted

Budget Blues

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

THE ANNUAL Scottish Budget was delivered uneventfully last Thursday afternoon. This was a change from last year when the Budget Secretary resigned just hours before when that morning’s Scottish Sun published no less than 270 text messages he had sent to a 16-year-old boy. This scandal continues to this day because the now disgraced Derek Mackay is still a salaried MP and expenses claimer.

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Pay cuts for Gas Workers

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

BRITISH GAS workers are continuing their strike action in opposition to a “fire and rehire” strategy by bosses. Their union, GMB states that their 12 days of strikes have created a backlog of 170,000 home repairs and 200,000 service visits

Read the full story here >> Pay cuts for Gas Workers

A jaunt into Saxon England

REVIEW by Ben Soton

KEN FOLLET’S latest novel, 'The Evening and The Morning', is a prequel to his 1989 book 'The Pillars of the Earth'. The two novels have both obvious similarities as well as differences. 'The Pillars of the Earth' was set in the early 12th Century and focused round the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge in south-west England. It was set to the backdrop of the Anarchy, a civil war between rival claimants to the English throne, where the god-fearing people of Kingsbridge were caught in the middle.

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Editorial

Retailing and Capitalism

THE DEMISE of Topshop, the clothing retailer whose boss once said it supplied suits for young men making their first appearance in court, is only the latest of many retail casualties of the coronavirus pandemic. Anything that remains of Topshop will be online, and we can be sure that the number of jobs moving online will be much smaller than those that are gone forever. Conditions in warehouses serving online retailers are usually worse.

The coronavirus is not the only cause of Topshop’s fall. It was part of the Arcadia empire owned by Philip Green. This also included British Home Stores (BHS), which earlier vanished because its owner was uninterested in developing the business and merely used it as a milch cow to purchase lavish yachts.

Read the full story here >> Retailing and Capitalism