The May county council elections in Britain this year brought some crumbs of comfort to the Labour Party as it gained more than 260 seats and its share of the vote stood at 29%. Given the dismal record of the Coalition, Labour had hoped for more gains.

Two major UK charities, Church Action on Poverty and Oxfam, today published a report entitled ‘Walking the Breadline: the scandal of food poverty in 21^st century Britain’. The report says that the last five years of violent cuts by the UK government have led to “destitution, hardship and hunger on a large scale”.

Public opinion in Britain and throughout the world was horrified by the murder of a soldier on the streets of Woolwich in South London. The gruesome images of a young man with bloodied hands, brandishing a kitchen knife and haranguing passers-by shook the entire nation to its foundations.

“We are running a race with Bolshevism, and the world is on fire.” President Woodrow Wilson, Paris, March 1919

Amidst the onslaught of privatisations, cuts, pay freezes and redundancies emerging from the capitalist crisis, Britain’s environment-conscious Green Party are becoming increasingly torn by political polarisation. Forced to carry out the same agenda of public sector cuts being advocated by the Con-Dem coalition in the interests of capital, the Green Party in Brighton & Hove City Council is beginning to experience inevitable contradictions and conflict regarding its political agenda.

In an article featured in The Times newspaper yesterday sees former Tory chancellor Lord Nigel Lawson calls for Britain to exit the European Union. This adds to the mounting pressure on Prime Minister David Cameron, and it reveals the deep rifts developing within the Tory party at all levels.

Last week local elections were held in many parts of Britain. The Tories, and their partners-in-crime the Lib Dems, had another bad night at the polls. The BBC now estimate that, based on these results, the main parties would get this share of the vote in a general election: Labour 29%, Tories 25%, UKIP 23%, Lib Dems 14%. A closer look indicates that Labour would do better, but there is still widespread mistrust towards the present Labour leadership.

Thousands of protesters participated in May Day (International Workers’ Day) in London yesterday. The banners and slogans raised were extremely militant, calling for the end of austerity throughout Europe by overthrowing capitalism.

While Thatcher is laid to rest, the heirs of Thatcher continue to haunt us. This Tory-led “we are all Thatcherites now” Coalition is presiding over the biggest assault on working people for more than 80 years.

Things are going from bad to worse as the British economy heads for another downgrade by the credit agency Fitch. This is a direct reflection of the continuing deterioration of the public finances as the economy stagnates, tax revenues fall and borrowing rises.

In the five years since the global financial crisis first exploded, life has been hard for Britain’s unemployed and working poor. The growing ranks of the unemployed have had their already insufficient benefits cut, disabled people have found themselves subject to demeaning and invasive work capability assessments, and low-paid workers have seen real-term wage cuts, attacks on pensions and employment rights slowly stripped away. All the while the cost of the basic necessities of life continues to soar, leaving millions of people struggling simply to get by. Yet, as bad as this might be, there is worse still to come.

Since the death of Margaret Thatcher last week the British Establishment have been revelling in their past. In a similar manner to the death of Princess Diana, the Royal Wedding and the Olympics, they believe that this event could serve as another circus to distract working class people from their problems. We would all come together as one nation and forget our class differences. This has been a serious miscalculation.

Len McCluskey, the General Secretary of UNITE, the largest union in Britain, has been re-elected. He received 144,000 votes while his only opponent in the election, Jerry Hicks, received nearly 80,000 votes. Over the course of the last few years McClusky has been moving to the left, putting such issues as reclaiming the Labour Party, nationalisation of the banks, the crisis of capitalismand the question of a ...

On Thursday 11th April, a packed Socialist Appeal meeting at University College London saw miners’ leaders and trade unionists recall the brutality of Thatcher and the bitter lessons etched into their consciousness.

There was a record participation of 110 attendees at Socialist Appeal sellers’ annual conference over the weekend of 6th and 7th April. The increased quantity was also expressed in a higher quality than ever before. Never has Marxism been as relevant and potentially powerfully as today, and never before have the ranks of the Marxists been as confident and optimistic.