Seventeen years after losing her council job due to needing endometriosis surgery, Michelle Dewar’s campaign for paid menstrual leave gained 50,000 signatures in a week, reports ELIZABETH SHORT
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Bogus self-employment epidemic collides with the coronavirus epidemic
MARK HARVEY of the Institute of Employment Rights argues that Britain has walked into a perfect storm due to employers forcing workers to register as self employed — with no responsibility toward them in times like the present crisis
From 35,000 troops in Talisman Sabre war games to HMS Spey provocations in the Taiwan Strait, Labour continues Tory militarisation — all while claiming to uphold ‘one China’ diplomatic agreements from 1972, reports KENNY COYLE
White racist rioting has many an infamous precedent in Britain, writes DAVID HORSLEY
The SNP might dissemble over the meaning of ‘nationalism,’ but it can’t disguise the fact that it is no left-wing party, says ELAINE SMITH
Castro became one of the first leaders to denounce Israeli genocide against Palestinians at the UN, comparing zionist persecution to Nazi crimes while Cuba trained PLO cadres and awarded Arafat state honours, writes PABLO MERIGUET
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
THE coronavirus infected self-employment chickens have come back to roost – in their millions.
In 1995, I wrote a pamphlet for the Institute of Employment Rights. It was called Towards the Insecurity Society. It showed how an epidemic of self-employment had exploded in the construction industry in the United Kingdom.
I argued that the growth of self-employed and insecure, casualised employment “promotes a pervading sense of insecurity. It also undermines the viability of the tax system on which the very existence of the welfare state is based.
It creates a vicious downward spiral, diminishing the revenues necessary for a welfare state whilst at the same time creating more people likely to be dependent on it: an insecurity society.”
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Mark Harvey pays tribute to a veteran of the days when the London building trade was a hotbed of working-class struggle, a legendary trade unionist, communist and poet
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