Scottish Labour's leaders cannot keep blaming Westminster for the collapse at the ballot box, says VINCE MILLS
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Defending the right to strike
Ahead of a TUC special Congress next weekend to fight Conservative anti-strike laws, JOHN FOSTER looks back to 1969 and 1972 when similar proposals were defeated through class solidarity and painstaking organising work
Over 30 years since apartheid was abolished, nasty anti-migrant rhetoric sweeps the corporate media. The Commnunist Party is ready to fight back, says ROGER McKENZIE
Over 100,000 people are expected on Brussels’s streets today. Ben Chacko speaks to Belgian Workers Party’s PETER MERTENS on wage and pensions attacks that have united the fightback
FRED BAYER says the cuts to the congress cycle could be disastrous for the Scottish trade union movement
Berlin’s Soviet war memorials are becoming the latest front in a political struggle to ‘de-Sovietise’ German history. NICO POPP reports
Western Marxism is a particular version of Marxist theory developed in – and acceptable to – the capitalist nations of Europe and North America and largely divorced from political action, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
BETWEEN 1969 and 1972 two successive attempts were made to limit the right to strike in Britain. Both were defeated.
The first was by a Labour government. In 1969 Harold Wilson produced his white paper, In Place of Strife, proposing to make unofficial strikes illegal and to punish unofficial strikers directly. Penalties were to include both fines and ultimately imprisonment.
The second was by Edward Heath’s Conservative government. Its 1971 Industrial Relations Act required the registration of all trade unions and laid down financial penalties for any union whose members were responsible for unofficial strikes deemed illegal under the Act. Strikers themselves were punishable at law for infringements of the Act.
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