By a Cardiff and Vale nurse Two Welsh health boards have announced plans to privatise their hospital pharmacies. Betsi Cadwaladr and Cardiff and Vale health boards say they cannot afford to employ sufficient dispensers to maintain an adequate service. They predict that outsourcing outpatient services to a private, community pharmacy will improve inpatient pharmacy services by reducing workload. This is ...

By Sasha O’Neil  “What’s important,” Sophie, Year 8, told the meeting last Thursday, “is to tell people how socialists like us are coming together to target capitalism and politicians.” Like Mason, Year 6, she’d spotted the “Socialist Change, Not Climate Change” posters we’d put up around their school and been eager to take part. When I asked Sophie whether she’d ...

By Robin Clapp Last week, US President Donald Trump announced that under the rarely invoked International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and seventy of its affiliated companies are set to be added to the ‘Entity List’. This effectively bans them from acquiring components and technology from American firms without obtaining prior government approval. This has massively ...

By a Welsh NHS nurse Following a damning report on maternity deaths at Cwm Taf Health Board, maternity services have been put in to special measures. Between January 2016 and September 2018, there were around 25 serious incidents including eight still births and five neonatal deaths at the Royal Glamorgan hospital, Llantrisant and Prince Charles hospital, Merthyr Tydfil. Parents report ...

By Beth Webster, nurse, Cardiff West Socialist Party The NHS crisis has reached horrifying new levels. Over 300 NHS nurses have died by suicide in seven years. In 2014, one nurse a week took their own lives. This is a tragic reflection of how overworked and desperate staff have become in a health service decimated by Tory austerity. The risk ...

A rally by far-right For Britain leader Anne Marie Waters, an openly racist islamophobe and political ally of Tommy Robinson, was held in Swansea on 27 April. A motley crew of 40-50 people gathered for a ‘national mobilisation’ within a tight police cordon to hear Waters’s hate speech, under the guise of a pro-Brexit protest. Some local leave voters expressed ...

As the age of austerity arising from the great crash of 2007-08 enters its second decade, a new movement of women struggling against their oppression is taking shape. But mistaken ideas on how oppression can be ended have resurfaced too. The ideas of socialist feminism are ever more relevant. By Christine Thomas Feminism is back. All over the globe women ...

Editorial of the April 2019 issue of Socialist Today (no. 227) As the first act in the Brexit drama reaches its concluding scenes, only one thing about the plot is certain. The reverberations from the working-class revolt against the capitalist establishment which, at bottom, the 2016 EU referendum result represented – a shout of rage at the age of austerity ...

By a Cardiff UCU member Staff at Cardiff University have been informed of plans to cut 380 posts over five years. This announcement comes while branches of the University and College Union (UCU) are balloting nationally over workload, casualisation, the gender pay gap and general levels of pay. UCU members at Cardiff University have responded to the job-cuts announcement by organising a simultaneous ballot ...

Hundreds of school students went on strike and descended in a very lively protest on the Senedd in Cardiff to protest at the inaction of world governments and corporations to prevent climate change. School students struck in schools in Cardiff, the Vale of Glamorgan and Carmarthenshire. The rally was part of a global movement Youth Strike 4 Climate which is ...