Recently we reported on the vote of the public sector unions to back the Croke Park Deal. We argued that despite the apparent victory of the ideas of “Social Partnership” as espoused by Peter McLoone and David Begg; under the present conditions it would be extremely difficult for any deal to be brokered that was worth the paper it was written on.

When David Cameron announced "The Big Society" (a name nicked from the American President Lyndon B. Johnson who used it in the '60s) during the election, most people laughed and assumed that would be the last we would hear of it. Tory spokespeople said that they had no idea what it meant and one Tory MP described it as "Bollocks." Indeed. However, now safely inside Number 10, Cameron has brought up it up again.

There’s been a steady procession of attacks on the public sector over the last couple of years. Wage cuts, levies and a deluge of propaganda. We’ve made the point elsewhere that the FF and the Greens are in a cul de sac, they are most likely going to be slaughtered in the next general election. So by all accounts they have nothing to lose. They have launched a one sided civil war against the working class at the behest of the bourgeois, the home grown variety of course, but also the multi nationals based in London and New York.

Journalists usually refer to August as the silly season. It is in that context that we have the latest madcap idea to come from the Con-Dem coalition. According to plans leaked by the Guardian newspaper, council housing tenancies will no longer be ‘for life.’

Today 6th August is the 20th anniversary of the death of Marxist MP and class fighter Pat Wall. In his memory we publish a tribute to him by Rob Sewell.

The New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) was set up in France, supposedly as an alternative to both the Communist and Socialist parties. The leaders of these two parties had shifted more and more towards market orientated policies. In reality the leadership of the NPA also suffer from the same illness, in that they believe that in order to be successful on the electoral front they must tone down the Communist and revolutionary content of this new party. That is not what many genuine revolutionary militants were expecting from the NPA.

Sarkozy lost his glossy image some time ago. But now he is exposed in the eyes of all. After all his bragging about his own extravagant lifestyle, he is attacking the living standards of pensioners, workers, students and the unemployed. The mood in France is an angry one. If the leaders of the left and the trade unions were to mobilise the workers, this government could be brought down relatively easy.

We conclude Dan Morley's three part study of the crisis inside UK housing.

Capitalism could only expand (and in a very chaotic, unbalanced, top-heavy fashion) the national housing stock through an enormous speculative bubble which only stored up greater problems for today. Now we find ourselves in the farcical situation of having a desperate, long-term housing shortage, and at the same time hundreds of thousands of unemployed construction workers, idle land and idle brick factories etc.

The question of housing in Britain today reveals much about the character of the crisis that permeates our entire society. Through the medium of housing we can see almost every problem our society faces - from inequality to out of control speculation, health problems to overcrowding, groaning infrastructures to gross regional imbalances and distortions.

More than a century after the formation of the Labour Party, the party still remains rooted in the organised working class. Despite everything, the results of the recent general election confirm the ingrained support for Labour throughout the working class areas of Britain.

The draconian budget rolled out in June is only the first instalment in a five year programme of austerity to be inflicted upon the British people. The Tory-dominated government is telling us that the economy is in a hole. This is true. They are softening us up for drastic cuts in public spending, saying we can’t afford it and (in the words of Thatcher) that there is no alternative. This is a lie.

The Croke Park deal has been pushed through by the ICTU leaders. On the surface, the policy of “social partnership” would appear to have won out. But this is based on the idea that such a deal will lay the ground for an end to further attacks. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Last week in France around two million workers came out onto the streets to express their anger at the latest government attacks on pensions. The union leaders hope to hold the movement at this level, i.e. of formal protest but no strike movement. But the workers are looking for more than this, as the growing discontent in the ranks of the labour movement clearly indicates.

The Saville report, almost 40 years since the events, has declared that those killed by British paratroopers were indeed innocent, something the people of Derry had known all along. Now there is an attempt to distance the British authorities from those tragic events and put the blame solely on this or that officer or soldier. Gerry Ruddy comments on why those events took place, the results that flowed from them and the lessons that need to be learnt.