23 February 1917 (8 March in today’s calendar) marked the beginning of the socialist revolution in Russia, which sparked a revolutionary wave that would travel around the world. In the Socialist in 2007, Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe analysed the lessons of February for the working class today and how the leadership of the Bolshevik party, particularly Lenin and ...

Tata steelworkers have reluctantly accepted a ‘gun to the head’ pension deal which will end their final salary pension scheme and see it being replaced by an inferior defined contribution pension scheme. Union leaders, Tata management, MPs, AMs and the Welsh government all repeated endlessly to the workforce: accept this deal or see the plant close. Union leaders have attempted ...

By Alec Thraves (Swansea Socialist Party) Hospital Sterilisation and Disinfection Unit (HSDU) workers at ABMU Health Board, covering Swansea, Neath/Port Talbot and Bridgend have been forced into taking strike action in an effort to bring their pay banding up to the equivalent of other HSDU workers in Health Boards across Wales. As the lengthy name of their unit suggests, we ...

Over 70 people packed into a meeting comprised mainly workers from the Llanelli benefits office called by the Labour Party to discuss how to oppose the possible loss of 157 jobs due to the proposed closure of the above office. These job losses if they came about would have an horrendous impact on the workers and their families and on ...

By Ross Saunders (Cardiff Socialist Party) Cardiff’s Labour-run Council stands at a crossroads this year: it can carry on down the road of slashing jobs and services, or take notice of the growing anti-austerity and anti-establishment mood that pushed Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party and decide to fight Tory cuts instead of helping to make them. Millions ...

By Alec Thraves The announcement that Tata Steel and the leaders of the steel unions have potentially reached an agreement to stop the closure of the Port Talbot works and the other Welsh and UK plants has understandably been greeted with enormous relief by the local community. It has been politically impossible for governments in Westminster and Cardiff to stand ...

By Sasha O’Neil Aberfan – it’s a name as resonant with tragedy for working class people in South Wales as Hillsborough is for Liverpool. For many the horror is all the greater because 116 of the 144 who died were young children. Like Hillsborough, Aberfan was a disaster that need never have happened. The coal waste tips that towered above ...

Socialist Party Wales is proposing “Campaigns4Corbyn” in as many different parts of Wales as possible. In Cardiff we would like to immediately establish a “Cardiff4Corbyn” campaign, inviting all individuals and organisations who want to defend Jeremy Corbyn from his right-wing opponents to participate and work together, including current Labour Party members and affiliated trade unions plus Corbyn-supporting unions like the ...

UCU members were out in force on picket lines at universities across Wales in the first day of UK-wide two-day strike action against a paltry 1.1% pay offer from university employers. “Comrades, this strike is all about respect” declared the branch president at the UCU on the Cardiff University picket line rally. Vice chancellors are receiving four times the wages ...

By Alec Thraves According to some commentators, the multinational Tata Group has a reputation of being a paternalistic and caring corporation that takes into consideration the wellbeing of its workforce. Try telling that to the 4,000 steelworkers in Port Talbot and the tens of thousands across the rest of England, Wales and Scotland who either work for Tata Steel or ...