FRAN HEATHCOTE believes that while the the Chancellor outlined some positive steps, the government does not appreciate the scale of the cost-of-living crisis affecting working-class people, whose lives are blighted by endemic low pay
The old is dying
GAWAIN LITTLE argues that the prolonged economic crisis we have been experiencing presents opportunities for a working-class fightback
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is pouring €11.5bn into the Kiev swamp, blocking Trump’s peace plan, and pushing Nato right up to Russia’s borders – no matter if it costs hundreds of thousands of lives, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN
The 2025 Budget shores up the PM’s political position with headline-grabbing welfare U-turns, but with no improvements on offer to declining public services or living standards, writes MICHAEL BURKE
The unifying victory of Irish progressive forces in the presidential campaign should be a salutary lesson to the left in this country, argues MARY GRIFFITHS CLARKE
Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
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
THE new year is a time to take stock. Over the past decade and a half, we have bounced from crisis to crisis. While the incompetent handling of these crises can be laid squarely at the door of the Conservative government that was in office for the bulk of this time, their roots go much deeper.
From the great economic crisis of 2007-09 to the cost-of-living crisis of 2022 onwards, we have been affected repeatedly by fractures in the economic system, which have hit working people particularly hard.
Each of these individual events has been precipitated by specific factors — most recently, the war in Ukraine, crop failures due to climate change and the destabilising impact of the Tories’ handling of Brexit. However, as Michael Roberts argues in a recent article on The Polycrisis of Capitalism (Theory and Struggle 2024), across the entire period, there are clear underlying factors, amounting to a prolonged crisis of accumulation.
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