Solidarity with the Antwerp Opel workers is growing as the solidarity committee links up with more and more groups of workers from many different workplaces.

This article was written just before the official announcement of the PCS strike ballot result on February 25, which confirmed massive support for action on 8-9th March. We are publishing it together with links to a series of short reports and interviews from the picket lines these past two days. Up to a quarter of a million jobs, possibly more, could be destroyed if government plans are allowed to go ahead. That explains the militant mood that has developed.

Right across the British Isles public services are under attack. The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) have called two days of strikes against cuts in redundancy pay. The British Government has put a cap on redundancy and hope to save over £500 million. The union fears it is the beginning of both massive redundancies in the public service and also creeping privatisation of those same public services.

There is a lot of talk about normalising the statelet in the North of Ireland. But what has been “normal” here for the past century has been precisely civil unrest, sectarian violence and armed resistance to British rule. The way out of this impasse is to be found in directing discontent towards the road of class struggle.

The comrades of Socialist Appeal in Britain produced the following pamphlet. It is a compilation of different articles written by comrades on tuition fees, cuts in university funding and the students' union, and tries to elaborate some demands for the student movement. We encourage our readers to acquaint themselves with our basic positions on the state of the education system in order to intervene in the movements against cuts and fees which have already begun in a lot of colleges and universities in Britain, but also all around the world.

As the 2010 General Election looms ever closer, we have started to see the first round of political posters appearing on hoardings around the country. The Tories have kicked their campaign off with a poster of an airbrushed photo of David Cameron looking very serious next to the slogan: “We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut the deficit not the NHS.”