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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Scottish Labour now has 37 MPs – but it can’t get complacent
The party north of the border needs to have a serious think about how it retains its newly elected MPs in the future. How those MPs are able to assert Scottish policy in the UK Parliament will be key, argues PAULINE BRYAN
Parliament
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
IN EARLY July the newly elected Scottish Labour MPs started arriving in Westminster just a day or two after the general election.
The 34 first-time elected MPs were joining Douglas Alexander who, after nine years’ absence, found himself back in a front-bench position, along with Michael Shanks, an MP for less a year, who now had a post in the Department of Energy.
Ian Murray, unsurprisingly, had been quickly confirmed as the Secretary of State for Scotland. These three excepted, there were no old hands to teach the new MPs the ropes and guide them through the challenges of being a Scottish MP in the UK Parliament.
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There is little benefit coming to Scotland or the wider UK from projects like Rosebank or Jackdaw – or indeed renewables – as profits are siphoned out of the country by foreign companies, writes PAULINE BRYAN
Unwanted, imposed Tory interventions on Scotland fuelled demands for devolution, and today Labour risks repeating past mistakes if Ian Murray seeks to bypass Holyrood on spending, warns PAULINE BRYAN
With a lack of radical thinking from the Starmer-led UK government, support for Scottish independence is unlikely to evaporate any time soon – spelling trouble ahead for Anas Sarwar, argues PAULINE BRYAN
It is impossible to ignore the huge flaws in our unelected second chamber — yet despite Labour’s promises of consultation, PAULINE BRYAN argues that it is falling short of doing what’s needed to safeguard democracy
