New Worker Banner

The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Lead story

Shady deals at the top: business as usual

by New Worker correspondent

EVIDENCE has recently come to light which surprisingly suggests that some things going on in the upper reaches of the Government at Westminster are not entirely cricket. Things are just as bad in Edinburgh.

Read the full story here >> Shady deals at the top: business as usual

In the Amazonian jungle

by New Worker correspondent

LAST WEEK we reported on struggles to organise workers at an Alabama warehouse belonging to predatory online retailer Amazon. Here in Britain it is not only Amazon’s warehouse workers, those outside who do the delivery work are also in need of a union.

Read the full story here >> In the Amazonian jungle

Nothing to boast about

by our Scottish political affairs correspondent

The genius of the SNP Government’s industrial policy has recently been demonstrated by the fact that two offshore engineering yards belonging to Bifab Fabrications have been sold for a maximum of £850,000 to Harland & Wolff. £650,000 (the price of a small London flat) will be paid in cash with the remaining £200,000 paid if group turnover exceeds £74 million in the next two years.

Read the full story here >> Nothing to boast about

A Pointless murder?

REVIEW by Ben Soton

I AM a ‘Pointless’ person; by which I mean a fan of the television quiz show of that name. The co-host of the show, Richard Osman has recently taken up the pen, or should I say laptop, as a novelist. The Thursday Murder Club is his first novel.

Set around Cooper’s Chase retirement village in the fictional Kent of town Fairhaven, an unusual group of senior citizens get together to discuss murder.

Read the full story here >> A Pointless murder?

Editorial

For a better tomorrow

IN FEUDAL DAYS everyone knew that virtually all the wealth in the world came from land – that’s why the nobles spent so much of their time killing each other to get more of it. To be fair, the lords and clergy who lived off the backs of the peasants who tilled it would often pretend to despise the comfort and wealth that came with being a high caste. The nobles claimed they were “protecting” their serfs. In fact, all they were defending were their own privileges. The medieval church, whose clergymen lived off the fat of the land, would routinely absolve itself by making saints out of those who actually took the teachings of the Prince of Peace at face value by embracing poverty and abstinence.

The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, began by elevating the ‘work ethic’ in their struggle against the aristocracy and the feudal Catholic church. They turned the Protestant doctrines to their own account to justify their own hegemony and when they won, they only reserved the ‘virtue of work’ for those they exploited and oppressed.

In 1848 the Communist Manifesto told the bourgeoisie that “a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism” whilst warning the workers that “all the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies”.

Read the full story here >> For a better tomorrow