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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Wes Streeting and the history of ‘the middle class’
Socialist historian KEITH FLETT unpacks the term currently being flung about by the Labour right as an insult and finds its popular association with ‘being a lefty’ is anything but assured in reality
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
WES STREETING has criticised “middle-class lefties” who he thinks are standing in the way of his efforts to privatise bits of the NHS should he get to be health secretary in the next government.
He might well find that the mostly not-middle-class Unison and RCN are even more formidable opponents.
Streeting will only fit the definition of a “lefty” if it’s one drawn up by Lee Anderson. However, his £90,000 desk job as an MP marks him out as definitively middle class. Social being defines consciousness, as any “middle-class lefty” could tell him.
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In the second part of her critique of Wes Streeting’s TenYear Plan for Health, HELEN MERCER looks at the central planks of this privatisation blueprint
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
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