SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
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State pensions: a diminishing ‘benefit’ under the Tories
What was once common sense to both major parties – that we all pay a little of our wages to receive a pension when we are too old to work – has been viciously undermined by decades of neoliberalism, explains NICK WRIGHT
A pile of one pound coins
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
TWO days ago my state pension went up in lockstep with the inflation figures for last year.
Useful, if not really keeping pace with the basket of price rises that devalues the average pension, but, raised in line with the Tories’ electorally effective “triple lock,” it is an effective marker of the ways in which the weekly income of working people and pensioners loses its value.
But it is not a bloody “benefit” — at least in the reworked meaning of that word. I paid for it with National Insurance deductions from my wages over decades. The proof is brought home with the carefully annotated reminder that my state pension is a bit higher than otherwise might be the case when I paid Barbara Castle’s enhanced State Earnings-Related Pension (Serps) contribution.
More from this author
The left must avoid shouting ‘racist’ and explain that the socialist alternative would benefit all
The left must confront both far-right bigotry and the undeniable problems the exploitation of migrant workers by the ruling class creates — but there are few lessons from the global left on how to strike this balance, laments NICK WRIGHT
Xenophobic hysteria over the statistically insignificant number of small-boat crossings deliberately conceals how capitalism manipulates population flows for profit — if we can explain that, we’ll beat the right, argues NICK WRIGHT
NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
