Britain

On the evening of 2 June there was an explosion at the Chevron refinery in Pembrokeshire in which 4 workers were killed and one seriously injured. Sky News quoted an unnamed person as saying that this was a "tragic industrial accident". It went on to say that the blast was not "thought to pose any ongoing threat" (from contaminants). They have apparently been safely blown away.

The police are playing an increasingly prominent role in the NHS and social services. As health services are more and more stretched there is a greater emphasis on maintaining public order.

Statistics, official and unofficial, continue to show that the state of the capitalist economy means further deterioration in the conditions of life of the working class.

Whichever way you look at 26 March, it was dominated by the unions and their supporters, in the banners, in the speeches, in the way that so much anger and frustration was transformed into a passive stroll. The SWP think it's possible to “Kick out Cameron’s crumbling coalition” (14/5/11) but 30 June is still dominated by unions and, as things stand, based on the proposals of Left and unions, will have no more effect that 26 March.

Why are nearly a million workers – from education, the civil service, local councils – preparing to go on strike on June 30th? They are more and more fed up with the never-ending attacks on their living standards being organised by the government, whether in the form of cuts in healthcare, rising tuition fees, growing unemployment, wage freezes or – a major issue in the June 30 strike – an assault on pensions, so that teachers for example will pay more towards their pension, retire later, and get a smaller pension at the end of it.

We are publishing here two short reports on recent meetings in London and Manchester which showed some small steps forward in developing collective discussion and activity among genuinely internationalist groups and tendencies.

On 23 September, in Calais, a whole phalanx of journalists and cameramen took part in a major media carnival organised by the French government: the evacuation of the ‘Jungle' a refuge for thousands of migrants living in abject misery in tents or under trees, barely surviving thanks to a few benevolent souls.

An advanced warning of possible future cuts in education has been provided by the decision to get rid of 1600 learner places in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at Tower Hamlets College, resulting in 60 teachers losing their jobs.

The killing of two soldiers and a policeman in Northern Ireland in early March was only news to the extent that the shootings were ‘successful'.

By the 14th century the foundations of the feudal system had been undermined throughout western Europe, creating the conditions for the emergence of a new mode of production.This article examines how the conditions for the bourgeois revolution in England matured within decaying feudal society.

On Saturday April 15, 1989, at an FA cup tie between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, 96 football fans were killed at Hillsborough stadium, Sheffield. This slaughter not only showed the contempt of the football authorities, the media and the police for the working class; it also showed that for the state, its police force is not there to protect and safeguard the masses, but has been perfected to repress them.

The IMF has declared that, of all the most developed economies, Britain's will be hit hardest by the recession.

Thirty years ago the working class in Britain launched a wave of militant strikes against crisis-ridden British capital in what became known as the ‘winter of discontent'. At its height this strike wave involved over 1.5 million workers in the largest work stoppage since the 1926 General Strike

The article published in WR320 is section A of the Report on the British situation fo the 18th WR congress. The whole of this report (which also covers the class struggle, British imperialism and the political problems of the British ruling class) can be found here in ICC Online .

We find ourselves analysing the British situation today after a year of the developing credit crunch and at the very beginning of a recession that even the chancellor predicts will be long and deep. This poses difficult questions for the bourgeoisie as it tries to keep the banking system afloat with unprecedented rescue packages and stabilise the economy. At the same time it is totally bogged down in failing military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside the USA which continue to drain resources. In spite of a policy of trying to spend its way out of the crisis, with money it has to borrow, the working class will be made to pay for the crisis.

The crisis - what's happening and why? What does it mean for us today and how can we be prepared for future struggles? These and related questions were the topical programme for a day school held in Brighton on Saturday 29th November, organised by some of the people involved with Aufheben and local anarchist and community activists. These are the impressions of one of the ICC sympathisers who took part.

There can be no doubt about the government's determination to defend the interests of British national capital abroad. We have only to look at the UK involvement in the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain isalways pronouncing on current conflicts, even if it is powerless to influence, as it was in Georgia, and even more now with David Milliband proposing an EU force on stand-by for the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

After months in the political doldrums, Gordon Brown finally has something to be cheerful about. At one point nearly removed by an internal Labour Party coup, he's now feted by Nobel Prize winning economists for saving the world economy through the example set in the bailout of British banks.

Since the bomb attacks of the 7th July the British government has used every available opportunity to boost the image of the state as the only thing which can protect the population from attack. The media were simultaneously calling for ‘national unity’ whilst decrying the forces of ‘Islamic terror’ present in our midst. The massive media barrage was repressive in itself, as it sought to overwhelm the population’s consciousness, and it undoubtedly contributed to the huge rise in racist attacks that followed the bombings. With the general fear in the population on their side, the chance arose to increase the repressive apparatus.

All the forces of the bourgeoisie, the left, the right, the far right and the extreme left, not to mention the trades unions, all came together in the grand electoral orchestra, whether in France and Holland for the referendums on the European constitution, for the parliamentary elections in Britain, or the Länder elections in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany's most heavily-populated region).

The death in April of Tony Cliff, leading figure in the Socialist Workers Party, and, before that, the International Socialists (1962-76) and the Socialist Review Group (1950-62), was greeted with expressions of solidarity and criticism from his fellow Trotskyists. For the SWP it was an opportunity to declare that "his unique intellectual contribution was to describe, in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union as state capitalist, and therefore imperialist" (Paul Foot in the Guardian 11/4/00). In his autobiography Cliff says that he thought about the question for two months and then "One early morning I jumped out of bed" and told his wife "‘Russia is not a workers’ state but state capitalist’".

After investigating four controversial killings in Northern Ireland, retired Canadian judge Peter Cory concluded that agents of the security forces were allowed to set up murders, which the army (especially its Force Research Unit), MI5 and special branch were aware of, encouraged and assisted with. As he made his recommendations for full public inquiries there were press reports that the Ministry of Defence was concerned that "further light would be shed on the undercover operations of the FRU after embarrassing disclosures by an ex-soldier under the pseudonym Martin Ingram" (Guardian, 2/4/04).