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Created: Thursday, 10 August 2017 15:45

Written by Robert Clough

As the Tory government staggers from one crisis to another, the odds of an early second general election grow. Prime Minister May’s bung of £1bn to get the parliamentary support of 12 neo-fascist Democratic Unionist Party MPs has provided her with a slender majority, but one which is at constant risk. Symptomatic of an unstable and dysfunctional government are:

• May’s lies that austerity was coming to an end when it is set to continue till after 2020,
• her appalling performance over the Grenfell Tower disaster,
• the obvious divisions within the cabinet over Brexit negotiations,
• Chancellor Philip Hammond’s dismissal of public sector workers as ‘overpaid’ in response to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s proposal to lift the pay cap.

In conditions of deepening economic crisis, which Brexit and parliamentary chaos will only worsen, the ruling class may need to act, and it is now more likely to accept the alternative of a Corbyn-led Labour government. Robert Clough reports.

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Created: Friday, 11 August 2017 09:38

Written by Robert Clough

With the Tory victory in the June general election, the process of wearing down the NHS continues apace. An election promise of an extra £8bn means nothing: none of it is available for the current financial year when, with demand overall increasing at 4% per annum, the actual increase in funding is a mere 1.3%, or in 2018/19, when it will be even less, 0.4%. The consequences are clear: longer waiting lists for operations, longer wait times for consultations, reductions in services, ever-extending eligibility criteria for receiving health care. 14 out of 44 Sustainability and Transformation Programme (STP) regions have been told to ‘think the unthinkable’ to meet the demands of a ‘capped expenditure process’: rationing will become the norm. Matters are only going to get worse as the number of nurses in training falls and half the current cohort of nurses become eligible for retirement by 2020.

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Created: Tuesday, 22 August 2017 10:59

Written by Newcastle Branch

Far from being a city of sanctuary as the Newcastle Labour council likes to claim, it is a city where

• immigration raids regularly take place in predominantly migrant-owned businesses, targeting migrant workers with irregular immigration status;

• asylum seekers frequently have their front doors kicked in during the early hours of the morning to be bundled into immigration vans and then imprisoned or deported;

• the same asylum seekers are forced to live in privatised, severely overcrowded housing, with leaking ceilings, broken boilers and cookers and bed bug infestation, and are often tagged and put on curfew by the Home Office.

However, this repression has bred resistance, and migrants, asylum seekers and other working class people in Newcastle have joined forces to fight back. They face not just state racism, but the forces of the opportunist left, which in the guise of the SWP censors the views of migrants and seeks to restrict the fight against racism to a shouting match with the EDL.

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Created: Thursday, 10 August 2017 15:24

Written by James Bell

Cuban celebrating National Rebellion Day on 26 July

On 16 June US President Donald Trump announced his intention to roll back the Obama administration’s policy toward Cuba in order to ‘seek a much better deal for the Cuban people and the United States of America’. His speech, delivered to an ensemble of reactionary Cubans in Miami, promised to enforce greater restrictions on travel and trade. Trump denounced Cuban socialism as the ‘Cuban people’s oppressor’ and praised previous US interventions on the island. However, he stopped far short of reversing Obama’s Cuba policy or of breaking off diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States re-established in 2015. James Bell reports.

President Trump faces the same problem that Obama confronted in 2014. Put bluntly, the strategy of economically and politically isolating socialist Cuba in order to destroy it, adopted by US imperialism since 1961, has not worked.

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