A November 15 protest in Mexico – driven by a right-wing social-media operation – has been miscast as a mass uprising against President Sheinbaum. In reality, the march was small, elite-backed and part of a wider attempt to sow unrest, argues DAVID RABY
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How can we keep social work politicised?
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
Despite new European arrests, the evidence presented so far fails to explain the sabotage of the undersea pipelines – and veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s allegations of US responsibility cannot be easily dismissed, writes ROGER McKENZIE
Groups are urging the US government to secure the 16-year old’s release as his mental and physical health decline dramatically after nine months inside Ofer prison, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
MAT COWARD tells the story of the eccentric founder of a short-lived but striking experiment in ‘vital democracy,’ who became best known for giving away his estate to the nation
As figures from Tucker Carlson to Nigel Farage flirt with neofascist rhetoric and mainstream leaders edge toward authoritarianism through war and repression, the conditions that once nurtured Hitlerism re-emerge — yet anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiments are also burgeoning anew, writes ANDREW MURRAY
As President Javier Milei is set to unveil a radical rollback of Argentina’s labour laws, unions warn of an unprecedented assault on workers’ rights, says BERT SCHOUWENBURG
HAVING just retired after 43 years as a social worker, I’ve had the opportunity to look back at the changes to our profession since I qualified back in 1980.
Many will argue that social work has become more “professional” as a plethora of research has been published into all aspects of the social work role, alongside tools for assessing service users on all sorts of things — their likelihood of reoffending, their ability to care for their children, their need for adult services — and frameworks for writing all sorts of different reports.
This has been presented as progress, but many of these developments have focused practice on the individual rather than setting it within the wider social and political context, understanding that the vast majority of the people we support in social work live in the poorest communities and are the most disadvantaged. The practice has become more focused on “individual failings” and social work has often been experienced by service users as both unhelpful and judgemental.
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The visa system traps workers with abusive employers, creating a vulnerable workforce scared to complain for fear of deportation — that is why we’re campaigning for a ‘common sponsorship’ model instead, writes FAVOUR DAVIDKING
The devastating impact of austerity has left Scotland’s education system on its knees, argues ANDREA BRADLEY, urging politicians to show courage by increasing wealth taxation to fund our schools properly
Tackling poverty in Scotland cannot happen without properly funded public services. Unison is leading the debate
From the ‘motherhood pay penalty’ to low-paid care work, the Morning Star Women’s Readers and Supporters Group in Scotland has been looking at how neoliberalism has been pushing back women’s hard-won gains, writes KATE RAMSDEN