The Socialist 13 January 2016

NHS not safe in Tory hands

Corbyn must lead a fight against the right and for an anti-austerity programme

NHS not safe in Tory hands

Junior doctors' strike: picket photos and reports

Health workers under attack!

Doctors battle burnout as 100 full-up GP surgeries apply to shut their doors

"Shattered but proud", a day in the life of a student nurse

Student nurses march to oppose bursary cut

Bosses 'earn' year's pay in under a week

BBC planned live Labour resignation to damage Corbyn

EU probes power plant for wrongdoing over switch from coal to biomass

What We Saw

Them & Us

Slums, speculation, sell-offs and sardines

Cameron's housing con

Housing staff strike against cuts

Cameron's 10,000 new homes won't hide the problem

476,000 homes in England go unbuilt by speculators

A clear strategy to defeat the Tory cuts

Council uses reserves to stop cuts

Councillors must resist cuts

Southampton people's budget meeting

Victor Jara's revolutionary life, poetry and politics

Letters

Sexual assaults in Cologne exploited by racist establishment and far right

Saudi Arabia mass executions

Honduras: Day of the endangered lawyer

West Dunbartonshire teachers strike

Energy-filled pickets at EDF

Workplace news in brief

"We hope to inspire people to go out and spread their passion for the Socialist"

Report: Socialist Party national women's meeting

Eleanor Marx: a life of struggle, solidarity and socialism

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Bosses 'earn' year's pay in under a week

Rachael Haines, Unite union rep (personal capacity)

By the first Tuesday of 2016, chief executives at the UK's top 'FTSE 100' firms were sitting happily on earnings it will take the average full-time worker a year to make.

So-called Fat Cat Tuesday is anything but cute. In fact, it highlights the enormous pay gap between the rich and the rest of us.

£27,645 by late afternoon on 5 January. That is a lot of cream for very few. It's an insult to those of us who work as hard as we do and for as long as we do for such little pay in return.

The bosses and their politicians constantly tell us that if we work passionately enough, and with enough commitment and stamina, we will be rewarded with a lifestyle of comfort and security. Fat Cat Tuesday comes as a grim reminder that this just isn't so.

We are creeping back to a kind of Dickensian horror show. The nation's pay gap increases year by year. The bosses' economic system is fuelling inequality and poverty - behind a façade of partnership, "we're all in it together", that no one seriously believes anymore.

Class

The pay gap gets to the very core of what it means and feels like to be working class. Workers and young people are excluded from lifestyles dangled in front of us in adverts and the press.

But there is a solution. Bosses like the FTSE fat cats don't make their money out of thin air. They rely on workers to make the goods and run the services, and then declare themselves and their shareholders the beneficiaries.

Taking these firms into public ownership, and taking the obscene wealth off the fat cat 1%, could mean a decent life for us all.

In this issue

What we think

Corbyn must lead a fight against the right and for an anti-austerity programme