Britain

The Hammersmith Branch of the Socialist League, William Morris is fifth from the right in the second row.

By Colin Fox

May 10, 2010 -- Did you hear the one about the election everyone lost? On May 6, 2010, Labour the party in power lost 100 seats and with it the chance to continue in government after 13 years. The Conservatives lost the victory all the polls had been promising them for the past 18 months. The Liberals suffered perhaps the most devastating humiliation after Cleggmania turned out to be a complete and utter mirage. The man who apparently wowed us so much in the great TV leadership debates actually lost a significant number of seats rather than gaining any.

The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) also lost seats. Instead of going from seven to 20 as SNP leader Alex Salmond confidently predicted they actually went back to six.

April 29, 2010 -- The Scottish Socialist Party is standing in 10 seats across Scotland in the UK general election on May 6.The video above was broadcast on BBC TV on April 23.

SSP election manifesto: `For an independent socialist Scotland'

No cuts, no wars, for an end to corruption

The British coalminers’ strike of 1984-5, which ended 25 years ago on March 3, was a turning point in British politics. In this article, Terry Conway discusses the impact of Women Against Pit Closures and its legacy.

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March 3, 2010 -- Socialist Resistance -- Since her election as prime minister in 1979, Margaret Thatcher had wasted little time in attacking working people in every way she could. The massive program of coal pit closures was critical for her government.

The strike was to be “the” central issue of British politics. The stakes were understood by the majority of members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), who saw that what was at stake was the loss of the thousands upon thousands of jobs and the devastation of entire communities in the many areas where the coal pit was the centre of local life.

By Ram Seegobin, Lalit de Klas

February 8, 2010

Dear leaders of Greenpeace [UK],

We understand that your organisation has taken a position in favour of the British government’s outrageous plan to create a “marine park” on territory which is not its own, thus tricking ill-informed people into supporting the British state on rather vague grounds of “the environment”, while they are in fact banishing the people who lived there and flaunting the Charter of the United Nations.

The Socialist Resistance national committee adopted this document, by Liam Mac Uaid, on January 9, 2010, to outline its balance sheet of the last decade’s attempts at the resolving the crisis of working-class representation in Britain.

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January 9, 2010 -- Socialist Resistance -- The workers’ movement in Britain has faced a crisis of working-class representation since the rise of New Labour in the mid-1990s and it has been becoming more acute ever since. This backdrop put left unity at the centre of the political agenda. The rise of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and the Socialist Alliance (SA) were the first organisational expressions of this necessary process. A critical look at the last decade is essential if we are not to make the same mistakes – those who do not learn from history are pretty likely to make the same ones all over again.

By Mick Hall

January 6, 2010 -- Organized Rage -- Despite all its shortcomings and some might say murky history, the Morning Star is about to celebrate its 80th year of publication. Which in today's economic climate would be an achievement for any newspaper, but this is especially so for a radical left of centre daily and must surely be something to celebrate.

That  survived the collapse of one of its main benefactors the Soviet Union was a major feat in itself and has had unforeseen, yet beneficial consequences. Having had the dead weight of Stalinism lifted from its editorial policy has proved liberating for the paper; and during the recent period it has moved beyond being a mouthpiece for what had become a form of sclerotic international communism, with football results thrown in, and is gradually becoming the voice the UK left has so desperately needed.

By the Public and Commercial Services Union (Britain)

By Duncan Chapel

November 14, 2009 -- Socialist Resistance -- The people on this platform share a lot of ideas.

By Hilary Wainwright and Andy Bowman