Labour Party
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NHS on the brink of extinction By Kailash Chand
In his speech to this year’s Labour conference, Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham confirmed that if the party wins the 2015 general election, he will introduce legislation to repeal the Health and Social Care Act 2012 in the following Queen’s Speech. Continue reading
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Labour-controlled Welsh Assembly carries out massive attack on the National Health Service By Mark Blackwood and Ajanta Silva
The Labour Party-controlled Welsh Assembly has carried out a massive attack on the National Health Service (NHS), entirely in line with the UK Conservative-Liberal Democrat government’s austerity agenda. Continue reading
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British NHS watchdog promotes privatisation By Barry Mason
The report that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) watchdog, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), suppressed one of its own investigative reports is the latest scandal to hit the organisation, whose supposed aim is to protect health and social care standards. Continue reading
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Mass austerity to be outlined in UK government spending review By Robert Stephens
WLGA director Steve Thomas commented last week, ‘We know that in England, in the first year of the cuts process in 2010-11, libraries were closed en masse, we saw leisure centres closed, we saw huge staff reductions across English local government—in total I think there’s been around 230,000 job losses. That carnage continues.’ Continue reading
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Book Review: Our NHS on the brink By Bernadette Hyland
Edited by Raymond Tallis and Dr Jacky Davis, ‘NHS SOS: How the NHS was betrayed – and how we can save it’ it is a difficult book to read. In chapter after chapter we see the way in which determined neoliberals have hacked away at a cherished British institution. Davis and her co-writers do not… Continue reading
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Death of Margaret Thatcher Reopens the Debate Over Her Cruel Legacy By Roger Annis
The death of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on April 8 has renewed an intense political debate in Britain and internationally over her legacy. For her ruling class sycophants, Thatcher was a heroine, “one of the greatest” prime ministers Britain ever had. Continue reading
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Crisis in the Socialist Workers Party reveals a crisis of the left By William Bowles
Hmmm… I’ve been watching the ‘left’ here in the UK tear itself apart literally for decades, and it had been going on for decades prior to my arrival on the scene. What’s difficult to swallow is the attitude expressed below (which I’m reprinting in its entirety), where the writer reacts to the events that are… Continue reading
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Blair makes (secret) comeback, somewhere in Lambeth today
Got this from Stop the War today. Apparently, War Criminal Blair is making a comeback and using the borough I live in, Lambeth, to do it in. However, there’s a catch: the Labour Party won’t tell anyone where the meeting is to take place. I wonder why? Continue reading
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Too little too late?
The 292,000-strong Public and Commercial Services Union … voted four to one in favour of using union funds to back anti-austerity candidates. Continue reading
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Sleepwalking into fascism By William Bowles
If I am right about the slumbering state of the Brits, and I fear that I am, what will it take to wake them up? Some kind of cataclysm, the total meltdown of society? Jackboots in the high street? We are almost there what with millions of surveillance cameras and snooping in our emails and… Continue reading
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UK Public Sector Strike: Osborne Lights the Fuse to a Perfect Storm
Osborne’s mini-budget, spewed forth in the House of Commons the day before the two million-strong one-day public sector strike over pensions, is a big ‘fuck you’ to the majority of the population of the UK. Continue reading
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Labouring under an illusion By William Bowles
Allegedly attacking the institutions that the Labour government wholeheartedly embraced–principally the financial sector and their “fast buck” culture–Ed Miliband, leader of the Labour Party, which even more than Thatcher created the conditions for today’s economic meltdown, now expects us to forget thirteen years of neoliberal, imperial rule under the ‘party of labour’ with exhortations by… Continue reading
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Independence for England? By Craig Murray
The Osborne theory – that public sector employment ‘crowds out’ private sector employment, and cutting public sector jobs will somehow automatically increase the production of private sector jobs – appears, in this large scale example in the actual UK economy – the opposite of the truth. Cutting public sector jobs cuts private sector jobs too.… Continue reading
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Disposable and Expendable By William Bowles
13 May 2011 21:00:25 — Strategic Culture Foundation Disposable: Osama As more ‘facts’ emerge about the assassination of Osama bin Laden, one thing is clear: that there has been active collaboration between the Empire and the media in suppressing the true nature of the events surrounding bin Laden’s death[1]. For starters, are we to believe Continue reading
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Libya: The Empire conducts a war fest (or business as usual) By William Bowles
A gaggle of the world’s most powerful, militarized states led by the US, UK, France and Canada are busy pulverizing countries around the planet, with the Ivory Coast being the latest addition to the orgy of destruction being carried out in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’. This is ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in the era of the… Continue reading
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March for the Alternative By Dan Hind
The 26th March demonstration in London was billed by its organizers, the TUC, as a ‘march for the alternative’. The march did, as the unions hoped, ‘give a voice’ to those affected by the cuts and it showed that ‘people reject the argument that there is no alternative’. Perhaps 500,000 people showed that, in time-honoured… Continue reading
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New Left Project interviews Ed Balls & John Denham By Jennifer O’Mahony
Readers may of course take it as read that NLP is not granting space to Balls and Denham because we share their politics. The value of the piece is that, whether or not we agree with the Labour leadership on a given issue, the parties’ policies will always be a matter of direct concern to… Continue reading
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‘Not Red Ed’ – reinventing Labour, again and again… By William Bowles
So what is ‘Not Red Ed’ up to? I hazard the following guess: It must have been pretty obvious that Labour would lose the election and having already stated that they would ‘put off’ cuts in public spending for a coupla years, Ed has predictably attacked the Tory/Lib-Dem govt’s plans to scupper our public services. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 