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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Day X: look for the fighters
As a new cold war gathers momentum, we must remember the last great anti-war movement — the hope, anguish and most of all the rage, writes ALEXANDER NORTON
day x 2003
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
THE scene outside Parliament was one I’ll never forget: watching a schoolgirl of about 14 run into the road from the main body of the demonstration and a great lump of a policeman just instinctively level her, then surging forth with the rest the crowd, none of us over 17, and seeing an even younger boy — still in school uniform — jab the officer in the eye with a broken placard stick.
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All the hope and awe at the biggest demonstrations the planet had ever known on February 15, when between six and 10 million people took part in protests in up to 60 countries, had evaporated: this was “Day X,” March 20 2003. We had answered the call to leave work or school and take to the city centres as soon as the invasion of Iraq by US and British troops had begun. We hadn’t stopped it.
We would not stop it, and have not to this day stopped “it” — the invasion and occupation of the Middle East by the United States — so the fact our movement would remain known as Stop the War almost taunted me.
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