Britain

The media in Britain and internationally have systematically portrayed the recent Lindsey dispute as being a struggle between “British workers and foreign workers”, when in actual fact it has nothing to do with this. The struggle was about defending wages and conditions as established in hard fought for trade union agreements. Here Rob Sewell points out some of the dirty tricks of the press.

Socialist Appeal interviewed Antonio Recano, an engineering shop steward, who worksin the construction and maintenance of industrial plants, and works for one of the companies operating within the Syracuse oil refinery. He is a member of the FIOM-CGIL (metalworkers' union), on its Syracuse provincial committee and also the Central Committee (national committee) of the FIOM-CGIL.

The protest at Lindsey was a victory for the workers involved. It sends out a clear message to the rest of the workers in Britain: militant action pays and shows what can be achieved in the face of attack. The background to this dispute was a deliberate employers’ offensive to undermine the National Agreement for the Engineering Construction Industry (NAECI) and had nothing whatosever to do with racism or xenophobic tendencies. It was the bourgeois media that consciously tried to portary it as such in order to hide the real content.

Last week industrial action began at the Lindsey refinery in Lincolnshire. Swiftly the strikes spread to Grangemouth in Scotland, Wilton in Cleveland and all over the country. By Friday 3,000 skilled workers were out from 11 plants. On Monday thousands more joined the action. As a news item, the dispute has been highlighted by pictures of workers carrying placards with the slogan, ‘British jobs for British workers.’ However, most of the workers on strike are aware that their enemy is the employer. That, after all, is who they are striking against.

On Thursday, January 22rd, there was a successful inauguration of Dr. Lal Khan's new book, "Pakistan's Other Story - The 1968-69 Revolution" in London. Young and old, students and trade unionists, turned up to hear a panel of speakers including Zakir Hussain, Qayyum Butt, and Alan Woods who addressed the audience before Lal Khan spoke. (Including videos of the speeches)

Stock exchanges in Britain and the USA have been on the slide over the past few days. The reason is not hard to seek. The FTSE has been spooked by bank shares collapsing. Barclays, for instance, saw 25% of its share price shaved off in one hour last Friday (16.01.09). This was the day after the bank announced 2,100 job losses. It’s starting to look like the time back in October when it seemed that banks such as Barclays and the Bank of Scotland (now HBOS) that had been in existence for hundreds of years would be destroyed by a share collapse in a matter of hours.

He is the hero of the hour, the man who, if we are to believe the media, single-handedly has saved the world financial system from meltdown. When all around were panicking and in despair, here was a man who kept his head and threw billions of pounds at the banks, a veritable 21st century miracle! That man is Gordon Brown, a man who dances to the tune of the bankers and capitalists, not the workers who voted Labour into power.

Sooner or later the financial tsunami will run into the sand, but in its wake the real economy will be left in recession. The immediate crisis will have abated, but the sludge, mud, sewage and devastation lasts much longer. They're still mopping up the mud from the 2007 floods… how long will the recession last and how deep will it go?

Now a policy of wage restraint during a serious financial crisis is, sooner or later a finished recipe for an intensification of the class struggle in Britain. Already the strike figures for this year - before the recent financial meltdown - have outstripped last year's figures

Winston Churchill is one of the most famous figures in British history and the official approach is that it would be unpatriotic not to admire him. The purpose of this article is to draw aside the veils of myth and legend which establishment historians and fawning admirers have spun around him and look at the real Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. The facts reveal a different man altogether.

In the early hours of this morning (08.10.08), the government and the financial authorities have finally agreed an ambitious plan to save the banks. They present the £50bn bail-out as decisive action to stop the rot. In fact their hands were forced, and there’s no sign that it will stem the panic on UK stock markets in any case.

On Wednesday around 100 people gathered in Bolívar Hall in London to attend what was a very successful launch of the English language edition of Alan Woods' latest book, Reformism or Revolution - A Reply to Heinz Dieterich. The debate revealed that as capitalism world enters into a deep crisis, the ideas of genuine socialism are alive and well. Now is the time to spread the ideas of revolutionary socialism. (Including the audio file of Alan Woods' speech).

Back in 1976 the Lucas Aerospace Company in Britain was preparing to sack 20% of its 18,000-strong workforce. The Shop Stewards approached their members for technically viable means of using the existing equipment and human expertise to make socially useful products instead of weapons. The result was a 6-volume document which revealed that workers have the know-how to run industry. What was lacking was the capital. For that you need to expropriate the capitalists.

Today Trades Councils in Britain have been consciously relegated to the sidelines by the trade union bureaucracy, but in this article, written at the time of the struggle against the Heath government's ill-fated Industrial Relations Act [1971] Dudley Edwards outlined the history of the trades councils in Britain and pointed to their potentially vital role.