As food and fuel run out, Gaza’s doctors appeal to the world to end the ‘genocide of children,’ reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER

THE coronavirus infected self-employment chickens have come back to roost – in their millions.
In 1995, I wrote a pamphlet for the Institute of Employment Rights. It was called Towards the Insecurity Society. It showed how an epidemic of self-employment had exploded in the construction industry in the United Kingdom.
I argued that the growth of self-employed and insecure, casualised employment “promotes a pervading sense of insecurity. It also undermines the viability of the tax system on which the very existence of the welfare state is based.
It creates a vicious downward spiral, diminishing the revenues necessary for a welfare state whilst at the same time creating more people likely to be dependent on it: an insecurity society.”

Mark Harvey pays tribute to a veteran of the days when the London building trade was a hotbed of working-class struggle, a legendary trade unionist, communist and poet

