Barts: start talking
THE LARGEST NHS trust in Britain is blundering towards the precipice of bankruptcy – flawed from the inception of the Barts PFI deal, delivered under the last Labour government.
Features
Features
The battle for the arts: people versus profit
Should the arts be expected to create capital, and capital expected to fund the arts? Or are the arts an essential human function that ultimately cannot be controlled by capital?
Arts education for all, too
No matter how hard it tries to push a private/public partnership agenda, the Warwick report cannot escape the key role of state education in developing the creativity and curiosity of students.
TTIP's drive to war
Opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is growing. And no wonder: it would have dangerous economic, legal, and political consequences.
Why Britain needs an independent energy policy
Want a country without enough energy to prevent blackouts? Fancy a return to the 18th century? Just stick with the muddle of complacent governments and environmental extremists...
In supermarket wars, we are the first casualty
The drive to increase supermarket profits has led to low pay, waves of redundancies, zero hours contracts and intolerable squeezes on agriculture.
The strange death of language centres
The Home Office originally funded language centres to help schools cope with large numbers of families with little or no English. And then came a pernicious reversal in policies…
Rotherham: more than a local problem?
The publication of the Jay report into the sexual exploitation of children in Rotherham has lifted the lid on what happens when professionals stay silent rather than stick their heads above the parapets of political correctness…
The 5 are back again!
The Miami Five are now all free and back home in Cuba with their families, we look at the background to this great victory…
Accounting for money in the Soviet Union
During Socialist transition some workers were in more mechanised workplaces than others, some less rationally organised or working with less up to date equipment etc. So the same product(s) produced from different locations could not at this time be directly exchanged with other products solely on the basis of the number of hours worked.
Bolshevik finance
How to run industry and finance without capitalism was one of the things the Bolsheviks learned how to do in the Soviet Union after the October Revolution – and we can learn something from studying how they did it.
How to house Britain
Housing has become a case of satisfying the greed of a tiny minority of capitalist speculators. And “build more houses” is not the answer to the housing shortage. Here are some alternatives…
And Johnson is calling us economically illiterate!
If you don’t agree that foreign investors should buy up swathes of London you are “economically illiterate”, says London Mayor Boris Johnson.
G20: the drive to war
The G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, in November made good TV: Russian President Putin as the naughty boy isolated by the other 19 countries, which took it in turns to call him names, forcing him to leave early. But it wasn't like that at all.
City pressures hit Britain’s aero engine maker
In November Rolls-Royce announced proposals to reduce its Aerospace Division workforce by 2,600 jobs worldwide over the next 18 months.
TTIP: a dagger aimed at Britain’s sovereignty
At last, a sea change is taking place in the thinking of the unions on TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership treaty being negotiated between the European Union and the US.
Pay: take up the fight
Health workers will have to decide whether to meekly acquiesce in a continuous reduction of earnings or find a way to do what generations of workers before them have done: fight to improve pay.
Britain – not for sale
Occupied countries learn the hard lesson that when you lose something it can be difficult, and often impossible, to get it back later.
TTIP: The extraordinary rendition of Britain
It is delusional to think that any body other than workers themselves can prevent the extraordinary rendition of Britain that TTIP represents.
TTIP: The Tufts study
The stark conclusions of a detailed academic study on the economic effects of TTIP seem to have shaken some unions out of their complacency about the deal.
Russia’s not our enemy
Is the US trying to push the EU into war with Russia? It’s starting to look like it…
Britain needs coal. Why can’t it be British coal?*
Britain’s coal industry is to be reduced to one deep pit and a handful of opencast mines. While the government drags its feet and the opposition remains silent, it falls to organised labour to put energy security on the agenda…
Aerospace: vital for Britain
The aerospace industry is a jewel in the crown of our high-tech manufacturing and a big source of skilled jobs. But there are clouds on the horizon.
Servicing the US Air Force
On the military side, Rolls-Royce has a $49 million contract to establish an engine maintenenace facility at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.
How the government’s loan repayments work
WARNING: If what follows sounds complicated, it’s because it is. The government has made its loans so complex that most students don’t really know what they are signing up for.
The next mis-selling scandal: why most of today’s students may never clear their debts
For many of today’s students a university place has become the first step on a ladder of debt that will be with them for the whole of their working lives.
Socialism and finance: lessons from the Soviet Union about securing real progress
The 1930s saw mass unemployment sweep across the world – though not in the Soviet Union, which planned its economy and took the concepts of credit and finance seriously...
Debt, trade imbalance, fake economic miracle. Yes, it’s happened before. In Germany
Germany has been directly and indirectly responsible for the mess the eurozone now finds itself in. And this is an issue on which the country has some form, around 80 years ago...
The NHS: fighting inside, fighting to win
For those working in the NHS, our best chance of entering the field in our best shape is the battle for pay...
The profit-lined way to motorway madness
The devastation of the rail network that began in the 1960s was a conscious decision to move away from a state-owned industry to private profit – led by a transport minister whose family ran a road-building company…