The Socialist issue 341

3 April 2004

“WHAT WE are saying is that we are going to have a go,” Nancy Taaffe told the socialist. Nancy, a member of Waltham Forest Unison and the Socialist Party in northeast London is helping to organise a local demonstration…

THE CIVIL service union PCS National Executive Committee (NEC) met last week. The news of Brown’s "day of the long knives" budget statement, announcing massive job cuts across the civil service, was ringing in our ears…

MORE THAN 4,000 nursery nurses across Scotland are entering their fifth week of all-out strike action as we go to press. With 80% still out on strike, the local government employers, New Labour-dominated CoSLA, completely miscalculated the energy…

A MASSIVE rise in reported cases of the ‘superbug’ MRSA in children must be a cause for concern to everyone…

ON THE eve of the crucial parliamentary vote on the final reading of the Higher Education bill, several Labour ‘rebel’ backbenchers were still threatening to oppose government plans to bring in top-up tuition fees (which the government calls ‘variable fees’)…

The New Satanic Mills

There are 5,500 UK call centres employing 400,000 workers, many of whom have no union representation and work in appalling conditions. These workers are now threatened with "off-shoring" or "out-sourcing"…

Hours cut in Knowsley: OVER 1,200 local authority employees of Merseyside’s Knowsley council are moving this month from a 37 to a 36 hour week, with no loss of pay, in the first of a two-part move which will result in a 35-hour week across the council workforce…

OVER 4,000 UNISON members in Newham, east London, are balloting this week to take strike action. The council is attempting to evict the union from its premises and withdraw full-time facilities from the three main branch officials…

Raffarin’s ‘Reforms’ Decisively Rejected

THE RIGHT-WING Chirac-Raffarin government in France is in political meltdown following disastrous regional election results. Its share of the vote slump to 36%…

MORE THAN 400 delegates and visitors attended the 2004 Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) conference on the weekend of 27 and 28 March in Edinburgh. This was the fifth, and largest, SSP conference and the first since the SSP’s election success of last…

Members of the Democratic Socialist Movement, our section in South Africa contacted us yesterday to report the violent breakup of a peaceful protest against housing conditions and the subsequent arrest of 14 demonstrators from Mount Moriah, outside Durban.