Uncategorized

On 22 June the new British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, unveiled his long-awaited austerity budget. It was an extremely nervous budget, only revealing clearly the tip of a mountainous iceberg of disasters to be visited on the working class during the course of the next few years.  There were even one or two … [Read more…]

Scale of the catastropheOn 20 April BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig, based in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded, killing eleven personnel and unleashing vast quantities of oil into the Atlantic.  BP’s own fictitious estimates of the quantities involved suggested a relatively minor leak, amounting to some 42,000 gallons a day; by early May even BP’s … [Read more…]

Background – the siege Since June 2007, Gaza has been under siege and subjected to a land, air and sea blockade.  The 1.5 million inhabitants of this, the most crowded place in the world, have been the target of collective punishment by the Israeli Zionist state, with the full backing of imperialism, in particular US … [Read more…]

In the first four months of 2010, relations between the United States and China have never been out of the headlines for long, reflecting the complex and multi-faceted relationship between the world’s leading imperialist power on the one hand, and the world’s leading developing (and socialist) nation on the other; the relationship between that bilateral … [Read more…]

Whatever official optimism is expressed in bourgeois circles whenever there is a scrap of countervailing good news on the economic front, the crisis is becoming more severe, with 2010 already being a year of new records in financial disaster, despite what Martin Wolf refers to as “fiscal and monetary stimuli that are unprecedented in peacetime” … [Read more…]

1 May 2010 sees the working-class masses all over the world standing on the brink of a serious confrontation with the imperialist ruling classes of the US, Europe and Japan. The economic crisis of the whole capitalist system, which has slowly been building up steam since the 1970s, has finally proved impossible to contain. In … [Read more…]

Whilst the war criminal Tony Blair walks free, having suffered not so much as a slapped wrist from the joke Chilcott Commission, the truly heroic Joe Glenton remains banged up for nine months at a prison camp in Colchester, a judgement that was confirmed on 21 April when his appeal was rejected.  His crime?  Refusing … [Read more…]

On the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the birth of Comrade Ho Chi Minh we publish a summary of the heroic struggle he led against Japanese, French and US imperialism. The culmination of Ho Chi Minh’s life work is wonderfully encapsulated in the words of General Vo Nguyen: “Time will pass by, but the … [Read more…]

The 2010 annual meeting of the Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland (ASGBI) was held at the BT convention centre in Liverpool, from 14 – 16 April. It was principally an event for the exchange of technical information and innovation and as such, one might assume, of limited interest to the readership of … [Read more…]

On 8 April the USA signed a new ‘arms control’ treaty with Russia with the published aim of controlling and limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. Communists and anti-imperialists the world over know only too well that this treaty won’t prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to terrorist states such as Israel; it is of … [Read more…]