ROGER McKENZIE highlights how health workers in DRC are struggling to contain a deadly Ebola outbreak in a region already suffering conflict, aid cuts and a legacy of imperialist degradation
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Lawfare on class warfare: the Tories and the strikes
Since the 1980s the Conservative Party has been trying to win its battles against the unions by changing the rules they are fought on — but you can’t change the material basis of industrial struggle, writes KEITH FLETT
TURNING POINT: Pickets face off with police outside the News International plant in Wapping, 1986
JOHN REES looks at why the June 20 international anti-war conference is such a vital initiative
Associate Professor BUI QUANG TUAN explains how modernisation and growth are helping to unlock new foreign investment in the Vietnamese economy
New workplace rights are welcome, but the survival of the trade union movement will be determined not in Westminster but in workplaces across the country, argues JOHN CARSON
Nearly two decades after leaving office, the former PM is still trumpeting the same futile militarism and failed free market dogmas. The question naturally arises: why does anyone still listen to him, says ANDREW MURRAY
Very modest growth in membership serves to underline the need for a change of recruiting strategies, posits NIGEL FLANAGAN
KARL MARX noted that the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living — and that certainly seems to be the case with current Tory attitudes to industrial action on the cost of living as Rishi Sunak promises yet more anti-union legislation.
The Murdoch-owned Times newspaper, for example, has opined on numerous occasions about trade unions, strikes and what union members must do — primarily stop them and get on with their work.
Yet nowhere in the Times commentaries, or indeed those of Tory ministers and MPs, is recognition of what the Thatcher governments did on trade union law.
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Forty years on, TONY DUBBINS revisits the Wapping dispute to argue that Murdoch’s real aim was union-busting – enabled by Thatcherite laws, police violence, compliant unions and a complicit media
Four decades on, the Wapping dispute stands as both a heroic act of resistance and a decisive moment in the long campaign to break trade union power. Lord JOHN HENDY KC looks back on the events of 1986
It’s not just the Starmer regime: the workers of Britain have always faced legal affronts on their right to assemble and dissent, and the Labour Party especially has meddled with our freedoms from its earliest days, writes KEITH FLETT
Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT