Britain

"The London police on strike. After that, anything can happen", said Sylvia Pankhurst in 1918. The ground is certainly shifting in Britain. There has been a continual build up of public anger at the government's attempt to impose a 2% limit on public sector pay. The Police are getting a paltry 1.9% rise, in effect a pay cut. They were furious and making all kinds of threats against the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and Gordon Brown.

New Labour fears that if Northern Rock collapses large sectors of the financial system could follow. And that would reverberate throughout the economy. Recession is on its way. A financial collapse could be the trigger. The right thing to do is nationalise Northern Rock, and with it take over the whole banking system.

Since 1979 UK child poverty has doubled. In 2006, 3.8 million children were living in poverty in homes on less than 60% of average income. Although this is a fall of about 600,000 since 1998, this still leaves 500,000 children above the Government's own target. This is not the whole picture either - poverty in the whole population is increasing.

Towards the end of last year we witnessed the collapse of another attempt to create a party to the left of Labour. The RESPECT party, which was founded in 2004, was the latest effort to establish an electoral alternative to Labour. It succeeded in winning an MP, George Galloway, as well as a few dozen councillors up and down the country. However, the whole project soon went pear-shaped.

Tommy Sheridan is facing yet another fight in his colourful career as Scotland's best known socialist. He has been arrested on suspicion of perjury arising from his widely publicised defamation case against the News of the World for which he was awarded £200,000 damages.

It is fashionable today among some on the left to refer to some golden age of "old labour". They use this to argue that in the past it was a workers' party but now it is no longer. The Blairites on the other hand claim that the party was too "left-wing" to be elected. But there has never been such a golden age. If you look at the record of Labour governments, they have all been responsible for cutting living standards and carrying out an imperialist foreign policy.

Andrew Glyn died from a brain tumour on 22 December 2007.  He was 64 years old.  A fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford since 1969, he was a leading socialist economist for all that time.

In 1970, just like today, the Labour Party seemed dead from the neck up. After six years of desperately disappointing government, Labour had been unceremoniously bundled out of office. The Tories were back, aiming to put the boot in to the working class.

At the University of East Anglia recently Rob Sewell of the Socialist Appeal gave a talk on the Miners strike in Britain 1984-5. The strike was a culmination of the inevitable build up of tension between the ruling and working class. In the post-war period the decline of British imperialism had occured. The Tories of the 1980s were a rabid reaction to that phenomenon, determined to destroy the organised labour movement by taking on its most militant section, the National Union of Miners.

One year ago today comrade Phil Mitchinson died tragically of a heart attack. He was without doubt a very talented comrade who devoted his time to editing the Socialist Appeal and helping to build our tendency in Britain and internationally. Here Rob Sewell remembers Phil and the role he played.

Marxists have always maintained that at some stage the intensity of the class struggle affects even the “armed bodies of men” of the bourgeois state. Such an example was the police strike in Britain at the end of the First World War. In the late summer of 1918 the sight of 12,000 furious Metropolitan constables marching on Whitehall sparked panic among ruling circles in Britain. Under the leadership of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers, militantly class-conscious policemen conspired to overturn their role as the subservient body of the State.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is occupying the headlines of many newspapers with his comments that Britain failed to act on intelligence that could have prevented the 7/7 London bombings. Beyond the response of the bourgeois media, what is the real relationship between the West and Saudi Arabia?

Comrade Phil Lloyd has died in Swansea at the age of 74. He joined the tendency led by Ted Grant back in the 1950s. He was a pioneer of the Marxist tendency and played a key role in its development. Alan Woods was one of the youth that that Phil Lloyd helped to recruit and educate. Here Alan remembers the man and fighter.

Some 130,000 postal workers in the Communication Workers Union were due to return to work yesterday after taking successful strike action in defence of terms and conditions. However, many workers were scandalized to discover that management had imposed new attendance times without their consent.

Last week speculation reached fever pitch in the press over whether or not Brown would call a snap General Election after only three months as prime minister. The Tories were languishing in the polls and the young Turks of New Labour's front bench were keen to launch an election. Then new polls showed a different picture. However, there is little enthusiasm amongst traditional Labour supporters and there are dangers of an economic crisis.