The Socialist issue 357

24 July 2004

THOUSANDS OF workers at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are striking against low pay on 29 and 30 July. The starting salary at the DWP is a scandalously low £10,300. Many DWP staff have to claim the very benefits they are…

TWO DAYS after chancellor Gordon Brown announced 104,000 job losses in the civil service, the main civil service trade union, PCS, organised a lobby of Parliament on the issues of jobs, pay and pensions…

"THE RESPONSE we’ve had campaigning against low pay has been amazing", Suzanne Beishon from Hackney International Socialist Resistance (ISR) told the socialist…

“It’s Been A Real Education”: JUST OVER three weeks ago Save Our Special Schools (SOSS) was a small local campaign that few outside the schools knew much about. But, as SCOTT HERBERT from Leicester reports, in the recent Leicester South by-election it made its mark.

Blair: Clinging On To The Wreckage

Editorial: BLAIR ‘CELEBRATED’ ten years at the top of New Labour a bruised and battered man. The Butler report into intelligence surrounding WMD and the war in Iraq let him off the hook yet again – blaming “collective responsibility”.

AS ANOTHER general election looms, Blair and Blunkett are renewing their pledge to tackle crime. After seven years of New Labour’s ‘tough on crime’ stance and the previous 19 years of Tory bootcamps, Blair believes it is time to end…

LORD BUTLER’S report on how Blair’s government tried to build support for Bush’s imperialist war on Iraq showed that government and state officials lied about the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction…

MEMBERS OF the rail union RMT, lobbying Parliament on 20 July for a publicly owned rail system, spoke to KEN SMITH…

ON 17 June HSBC bank announced that it would be cutting 3,500 jobs in the UK. 500 of these jobs would be ‘off-shored’ to HSBC’s call centres in India and Malaysia. Although HSBC said that these changes were to "improve the productivity…