General secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions GAWAIN LITTLE calls for support and participation in the national partnership organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1926 general strike
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Brave political decisions needed
Properly funded public services are good for the economy as a whole, says KATE RAMSDEN
Money
After brutal police crackdowns on pensioners and the forced approval of secret IMF deals, trade unions are finally responding to grassroots pressure and fighting back against savage neoliberal reforms, reports BERT SCHOUWENBURG
Bizarrely, Trump’s latest attacks now include the National Zoo, but his real and racist agenda is to strip everything black from the country’s cultural institutions, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
The economic value of disability benefits far outweighs their cost, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY
As tensions rise in the Middle East, the role of Iran in the region’s political balance becomes ever more significant. STEVE BISHOP assesses the current situation
ALTHOUGH I share the Morning Star’s scepticism about whether Labour’s manifesto commitment, A New Deal for Working People, will ever become a reality, I have to admit a little frisson of delight when I read: “Boosting people’s incomes is not just the right thing for them — it is the right thing for the economy.”
Why? Because I have been banging on for many years now, to anyone who will listen, about the need to change the economic narrative — both around workers’ pay and public services. It is still the case that despite years of austerity, many of our members and much of the general public, while increasingly more sympathetic, see pay rises for our members, and especially those in the public sector, as a drain on the economy and therefore unaffordable.
Similarly, although the public are generally positive about public services — a Survation poll in 2022 showed a high level of trust in public services — they can’t get their head around the fact that, rather than a drain, public services are a key lever for economic growth. Because that is not the prevailing narrative. It’s not what this UK government of the rich wants us to see.
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In the past, egalitarian trade union politics went hand in hand with how we saw our role in society itself — we must fight to preserve that in the changing sociopolitical context, writes KATE RAMSDEN
