Uncategorized

The political map of the Republic of Ireland has undergone an unprecedented change as a result of the general election held in that state on 25 February 2011.Occurring against the backdrop of the impact on Ireland of the eurozone crisis, which has seen Ireland forced into a humiliating £72 billion EU-IMF bailout to rescue its … [Read more…]

The Socialist Party gets it half rightThe decision taken by the National Shop Stewards Network at a special conference on 22nd January to put its growing weight behind a national anti-cuts campaign, with organised labour at its core, is welcome news.  The rising tide of popular support amongst union militants for the proposal to break … [Read more…]

The publication of the Palestine Papers by Al-Jazeera, and by The Guardian, has come as a great shock to those who believed that Israel and/or the US ever sincerely sought to bring peace to Palestine through the 2-state solution that was agreed in Oslo.  Indeed, they have made it clear that they are only interested … [Read more…]

As the cuts in public spending, jobs, wages, benefits, services etc., resulting from the crisis of over-production, still only in the early stages, begin to bite harder, the lie machine of social democracy (the agents of imperialism within our ranks who seek always to lead us down the road of voting for the Labour Party … [Read more…]

Interview with Mohamed Hassan, a former Ethiopian ambassador, and leading expert in the politics of the Middle East and the Arab and Islamic world generally.Interview conducted by Grégoire Lalieu and Michel Collon on 1 February  2011, i.e., after the Tunisian revolution but before the downfall of Mubarak. – translated from French original. Reproduced from the … [Read more…]

William Hague, former Conservative leader and current Foreign Secretary, has personally intervened in a dispute involving two British oil companies and one of the world’s poorest nations.Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that Hague, along with Conservative MP Henry Bellingham, lobbied heavily on behalf of Tullow Oil, who was embroiled in a … [Read more…]

Dr Binayak Sen is a popular paediatrician in India, he is known as a “Barefoot Doctor”. Sen has dedicated his work to the rural poor in India. He was handed a life sentence in prison for sedition by the government of Chhattisgarh (a state in central India).His only crime had been to expose the blatant … [Read more…]

The representatives of the world’s ‘great and good’ have just met, again, to discuss carbon emissions at the Cancun climate control summit where they pontificated, made solemn sounding statements, debated and tried to outwit each other, not to mention the rest of us, with various versions of an ecological ‘three card trick’, where each imperialist … [Read more…]

With the negative example of the crisis of the 1930s before them, bourgeois economists and politicians are struggling violently – if in vain – to avoid the “mistakes” of that era.  Anxious to blame “mistakes” rather than capitalism itself for the crisis that devastated the capitalist world at that time and blighted millions of lives … [Read more…]

As capitalist Britain spirals deeper into crisis, the curse of poverty spreads ever wider and deeper, taking ever nastier forms.  One kind of poverty has in recent years been sanitised with a fancy new name in social work circles: “fuel poverty”.  If a family has to spend more than 10% of its income on heating, … [Read more…]