The Socialist 26 July 2017

Barts health strike: Low pay, no way!

Right wing attempts to use single market against Corbyn

Barts health strike: Low pay, no way!

Birmingham bin workers stand firm

Bron Afon workers strike against £3,000 pay cut

Court victory for PCS and all trade unions

Tesco's 10% pay increase accompanied by cuts and job losses

Mears workers escalate action to all-out strike

Workers' campaign underway to stop ward closure

Workplace news in brief

Building workers' struggle and the forces of international socialism

Abolish tuition fees and student debt!

Education cuts: Tories buckling under public pressure

BBC yawning pay gaps revealed

Homelessness and evictions soar under the Tories

Them & Us

Russia 1917: how art helped make the revolution

Young people...fight for a future, fight for socialist policies

Grenfell survivors tell Tories: "Step down and resign"

Vigil for Grenfell

Tenants' meeting reveals huge anger

Corbyn visits Southampton on marginal seat tour

Huddersfield A&E closure referred to Jeremy Hunt

From Militant to the Socialist Party - what you thought

Socialist sales at Salford station

Street cleaners support the Birmingham bin strike

'Freedom riders' lobby against violent policing

Council meeting abandoned after undercover policing protest

Education cuts forced back in Hackney

Southampton councillors faced with angry anti-cuts campaigners

Plans to bring A-levels back to Knowsley abandoned

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Them & Us

Them and us fishes, photo Suzanne Beishon (Click to enlarge)

Bosses' profit...

The bosses' greed knows no bounds. This year UK companies paid out a record £33.3 billion in dividend payments, up 15% from last year.

That money could have been put to raising the wages of millions of the low paid and into services to benefit working class communities. For the bosses their priority is lining their own pockets from the exploitation of workers.

(thanks to Bill Murray)

...From workers' unpaid labour

Meanwhile nurses, social workers, teaching assistants and many others who struggle to keep our vital public services going are, according to the GMB union, clocking up an average eight hours unpaid work each week. This translates into an estimated £11 billion freebie for the government.

So much for Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond's bull that public sector workers are "overpaid".

No optical illusion

photo James (Creative Commons) (Click to enlarge)

It's not your eyesight deteriorating, retail products - 2,529 over the past five years - have been shrunk by manufacturers.

Are smaller Toblerone's and Maltesers, etc, the capitalists' way of tackling the obesity health crisis? No. Apparently it's their charitable way of 'keeping the product affordable' - even though the products cost the same.

Readers may think that such a change, in effect, is a price rise and of course they'd be right. The bosses defend this sleight of hand by claiming production costs have soared and therefore they're protecting the consumer from price hikes. How kind!

However, the wholesale price of ingredients, like sugar and cocoa, has fallen. So it's a simple case of profiteering. Perhaps reducing the size of the capitalist class to zero might help.

Longevity and austerity

Move to the planet Vulcan or fight the cuts if you want to 'live long and prosper'.

According to Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity at University College London: "Since 2010, the rate of increase in life expectancy [in England] has about halved."

Marmot's research suggests that the slowdown in life expectancy rates has coincided with austerity measures that have seen massive cuts in health and social care spending in England. Before 2010, spending on the NHS rose around 3.8% each year, but this has since fallen to 1.1% a year.

In this issue

What we think

Right wing attempts to use single market against Corbyn