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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Lead story

Ukrainian Nazis still hold hostages

by our European Affairs correspondent

FIERCE FIGHTING continues across eastern Ukraine as Russian and Donbas forces push to drive the Ukrainian fascists out of the Don basin. But the Azov brigade is still holed up in the Azovstal plant in Mariupol, holding hundreds of civilians hostage and refusing to lay down their arms even though their position is hopeless.

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56 pence and all is well

by New Worker correspondent

TO REINFORCE the point about care workers leaving for supermarkets, on Monday GMB announced that it had secured a deal with supermarket chain Asda that their workers will now get £10.10 basic rate, an increase from £9.66.

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A risky business

A review by Ben Soton

VAL MCDERMID’S latest bestseller takes us back to the year of the Winter of Discontent, the first Scottish devolution referendum and what some might consider to be this country’s last Labour Government.

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Editorial

This time is different

IT IS DIFFICULT to evince any enthusiasm for local elections. Although councils run key local services and administer huge budgets on behalf of central government, the independent power they once had has long gone. Few beyond the parish-pump activists of the main political parties and local cranks take any interest in local politics. On the street hardly anyone knows who their local councillors are or, indeed, who’s standing in these elections. This is why few can be bothered to vote on the day. But this time round is different, and the results could end the political careers of Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer.

Although local polls are only important to those whose livelihoods depend on who runs the Town Hall, they are barometers of public opinion. If the Tories lose badly throughout the country Johnson is toast. If Labour fails to make spectacular gains so is Starmer.

Johnson may well be the first to go. Deceiving parliament over the ‘Partygate’ scandal may well be trivial compared with Tony Blair’s lies about the “weapons of mass destruction” used to justify British support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it is still a serious breach of bourgeois parliamentary norms that the Remainers will use to get rid of the man who took Britain out of the European Union.

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