B usinesses can now provide skilled agency workers to plug staffing gaps caused by strike action under changes to the law coming into force on Thursday, the Government has announced. Ministers said they have worked at speed to repeal trade union laws that restrict employment businesses from providing temporary agency …
Read More »Royal Mail rotating daily which streets do not receive letters, MPs told
R oyal Mail delivery offices across the country are deciding each day which streets do not receive letters after a “failure” in restructuring, MPs have heard. Concerns highlighted by Labour MP Barry Gardiner (Brent North) are to be raised with Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng. Mr Gardiner told the Commons: “Royal …
Read More »Britain’s rail strike and the struggle against war: Bring down the Johnson government!
Rail workers in the UK will walk out again Thursday for the second of three days of national strike action. This is no ordinary industrial dispute. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his government of political gangsters want to emulate Margaret Thatcher’s targeting of the miners in 1984-85, which ended in …
Read More »Pressure grows on Government to expel Russian Ambassador from Ireland
Pressure is growing on the Government to expel the Russian ambassador, as protests continued today in Dublin against the invasion of Ukraine. On Saturday afternoon, dozens of protesters once again gathered outside the Russian Embassy on Orwell Road in Rathmines to call on Russia to end the attacks on Ukraine. …
Read More »Trade union leaders and socialist MSPs call on Labour to ‘be bolder’ about pandemic recovery
TRADE union leaders in Scotland and socialist MSPs called on Labour today to be bolder in its opposition to neoliberal efforts from both the Scottish and UK governments as Britain looks to recover from the coronavirus crisis. Speaking at the Morning Star Scotland conference, leading left-wing voices from across Britain came …
Read More »Editorial: Labour’s leaked report one year on: rebuild a mass politics
ONE year since a devastating leaked report exposed sabotage of Labour’s 2017 election campaign, the party is pulling out all the stops to hold Hartlepool. MPs who spent five years sniping at Jeremy Corbyn rounded furiously on the CWU union last week simply for commissioning a poll indicating Labour is …
Read More »Hartlepool by-election: Tories open up shock seven-point lead over Labour, says poll
L abour is on course for an “absolutely catastrophic” result in the Hartlepool by-election next month with the Tories ahead by a clear margin, according to a new poll. A month before the vote, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives are ahead by seven points in a poll commissioned by the Communication Workers …
Read More »The DUP’s reunited Ireland, Andrew Neil’s revenge channel, and academic espionage
Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists, being old-fashioned British patriots, didn’t want to stay in the EU or even settle for a soft Brexit. They didn’t want a hard border with the Irish Republic because business demands “seamless and frictionless” trade. They certainly didn’t want anything resembling a border in the Irish …
Read More »After 26 years editing the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre will be bored to tears by Ofcom red tape
It is not known whether Boris Johnson is an enthusiast for Louis Althusser’s critique of Antonio Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony, but it looks as if he might be. The prospect of Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail and editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers, becoming the next chair …
Read More »The Covid-19 crisis and the virtues of an active state
In 2014, as the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer sought to take over AstraZeneca, the UK’s second largest pharmaceutical company, the British government insisted it would not intervene. David Cameron and George Osborne suggested that the bid was purely a commercial matter for shareholders and refused to apply a “public interest test”. …
Read More »