National News
Student action for Palestine!
by New Worker correspondent
A student uprising in support of the Palestinian people that began in America is now sweeping the world. And here in Britain more and more and more students are setting up protest camps in the hallowed halls of academia to demand an end to the slaughter in Gaza. Students At Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh have joined the eight other British campuses who are taking action to demand our universities end their complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide. This week students set up a Palestine solidarity encampment outside the natural history museum in Oxford. Organised by Oxford Action for Palestine, a collective of members of the University of Oxford community who are dedicated to Palestinian liberation, over 60 faculty and staff members have signed a letter in support.
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London’s Transport
by New Worker correspondent
In South West London an improved pay offer for 40 control room staff at Battersea and Twickenham bus depots has averted strike action. Unite regional officer Maxine Loza said: “Transport UK has come forward with a new pay offer that will now be put to a ballot of our members. As a goodwill gesture, Unite is suspending the planned industrial action that was due to begin next week.”
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On the High Seas
by New Worker correspondent
The Royal Fleet Auxiliary ( RFA ) has become an unexpected battleground in the class struggle. Founded in 1905 and owned by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), it provides logistical and operational support to the Royal Navy and Royal Marines such as supplying fuel and stores providing medical care and transporting equipment and essentials across the globe.
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On the Rails
by New Worker correspondent
Drivers’ union ASLEF are continuing their selective industrial action in pursuit of their long standing pay struggles. General Secretary Mick Whelan said the year-old pay offer of four per cent, the first since 2019 was “dead in the water”. These offers come with too many strings attached. Mick Whelan, added: “It is now a year since we sat in a room with the train companies, and a year since we rejected the risible offer they made and which they admitted, privately, was designed to be rejected.”
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Licence to Retain Money
by New Worker correspondent
“A licence to print money” was how owner Roy Thomson described his brand new Scottish Television in 1956. The TV station, now the only one of the original commercial franchises not owned by ITV, is still a money spinner, but not for the workers.
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Scottish Political News
by our Scottish political affairs correspondent
Monday was the first anniversary of the present King’s coronation. This occasion was marked by the SNP holding a modest coronation of their own. Lunchtime saw the formal announcement that former Deputy Leader John Swinney was to become the SNP’s unchallenged new leader.
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International News
Climbing the ‘Escalation Ladder’
by John Miles sputnik
Moscow has responded aggressively to claims that Kiev may use British weapons to strike within Russia, claiming such an attack would force the country to target UK military installations in Ukraine and beyond.
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A Bridge to the West
Global Times
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived on Sunday in Paris for a state visit to France on the first stop of his European trip. He received a grand welcome from the French side. President Xi’s speech upon arrival at Paris Orly airport, his signed article published in Le Figaro, and the China–France– EU trilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have continued to spark heated discussions in Western public opinion, highlighting the significance of this visit at the bilateral, European and global levels
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Features
Dark stories for dark times
by Dennis Broe , People’s World (USA)
This year the Quais du Polar in Lyon, the largest European festival of crime novels and one of the largest in the world, in celebrating its 20th season, was marked by the intrusion into the spine of the novels by the realworld problems and catastrophes going on around the festival.
Each evening, just outside the festival walls, in front of the town hall, there was a vigil calling for a ceasefire in Gaza while inside there were novelists incorporating climate apocalypse, rabid income inequality, and the indignity of European cities, most notably Venice and Barcelona, overcome by tourism.
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If the US nukes return Britain will be on the front-line
Global Times
Are US nuclear weapons returning to the UK after 16 years? This worries many British people, and one of them is Angie Zelter. Last year there were reports saying that the Americans are planning to station nuclear weapons at RAF Lakenheath, a base in East Anglia. A group of activists, including Angie Zelter, formed the Lakenheath Alliance for Peace to oppose the return of the American nukes. As a veteran activist, Angie has been campaigning against US nuclear weapons for 33 years in Norfolk. She now tells Wang Wenwen why.
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How the West was won
Review by Ben Soton
How The World Made the West by Josephine Quinn. Bloomsbury Publishing 2024 , 576pp, Hbk £30.
The idea of ‘Western civilisation’ distinct from the rest of the world is the basis of reactionary ideology in it’s liberal, conservative and even fascist formats. Reactionaries would have us believe that Western values such as democracy and individualism originated in the GrecoPersian Wars of the fifth century BC. This thinking underpins much of European imperialism’s actions over the last few hundred years.
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50 Years after the Portuguese Revolution
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey , Pravda.ru
On 25th April 1974 the song Grândola, Vila Morena by José Afonso played on the radio, signalling the beginning of the end of Portugal’s fascist regime.
A military coup, the 25th April Revolution was a tremendous victory for the Portuguese Communist Party and other political and social movements, ending the fascist, authoritarian, corporate and repressive ‘Estado Novo’ regime founded by Dr António de Oliveira Salazar in 1933. Salazar had a stroke in 1968 and died in 1970 and Marcelo Caetano took over, opening the regime up slightly but slowly. But it was an economy of the haves and the have nots based on an oligarchy of forty families.
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