By Stephen MacAvoy
Falling real wages, record youth unemployment and collapsing living standards are not by-products but the aim of Tory economic strategy.
By Stephen MacAvoy
The mobilisation of several thousand anti-fascists - including local Muslim and other faith communities, trade unionists, students, LGBT organisations and many others - in Tower Hamlets on 3 September landed a huge defeat on the EDL by preventing it from entering the borough.
By Jane West
It is entirely good news to see the convulsions shaking the British end of Murdoch’s global media empire and to bid farewell to the unlamented News of the World. Murdoch has of course created a stable of publications and news channels that are cheerleaders for an extremely right-wing politics, both in the Britain and the US.
By Tim Robinson
With the economy showing no signs of returning to respectable growth and both living standards and the government’s popularity continuing to fall, the Tories responded by playing the race card on 1 July.
By Stephen MacAvoy
Today (30 June), hundreds of thousands of teachers, lecturers, government office workers, job centre staff, air traffic controllers and many other public sector workers are striking against the Tory government’s attacks on their living standards with cuts to pay and pensions.
By Jane West
The highly flagged speech made by Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, at the London School of Economics on 16th June potentially can help put Labour on the offensive against the Tories’ disastrous economic policies. It does not go far enough but is a welcome step forward.
By Tom O’Donnell
The first simultaneous strikes against the government’s policies seems inevitable at the end of June. Following the upsurge of student protest at the cuts to higher education, and allowances and the hike in fees it was no coincidence that the first union to take major action was the college lecturers’ union the UCU, followed by a series of local actions by the teacher’s union NUT.
By Nicky Dempsey
The first serious political difficulty for the current government rose from the student mobilisation against rising tuition fees and the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance. The government pressed on regardless – and produced a collapse in the vote for the LibDems at the recent local elections largely because they have been seen to betray a specific pre-election promise.
First published: July 1997
The 1 May general election did not simply close 18 years of Conservative government. It brought to an end an entire era in British politics – a 111 year-long political party system based on the dominance of the Conservative Party.
This assertion may cut against the grain of the media coverage – which has been mesmerised by the scale of Labour’s majority in parliament – but it nonetheless corresponds to the facts.
On 1 May Labour won its biggest parliamentary majority in history – an overall majority of 179 seats. But it did so with a share of the UK vote, at 43.2 per cent, which does not remotely qualify as record-breaking. The party won a larger proportion of the vote in 1945, 1950, 1951, 1955, 1959, 1964 and 1966 – that is, in every single general election between 1945 and 1966. That included three elections which it lost and Harold Wilson’s 44.1 per cent in 1964 which gave him a majority of just four seats.
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