News and Analysis

By Rob Williams, Socialist Party trade union organiser 2023 is beginning as 2022 ended, with significant nationwide strike action, this time of railway workers in RMT and Aslef. Postal workers continue their fight against Royal Mail bosses and are gearing up for a mandatory reballot after six months of strikes. NHS workers, nurses and ambulance workers have more strike dates set for this ...

By Hannah Sell, Socialist Party General Secretary The Socialist Party enters 2023 full of optimism. The reasons for pessimism or even despair are obvious. 2022 was a year of dramatically falling living standards, frightening climate change, and the horror of war; and all this is set to continue. As inflation has soared, billions more people around the world are left ...

By Dave Reid 600 jobs at a semiconductor plant in Newport have been thrown into doubt as the plant is caught between farcical mismanagement by the Tory UK government and geopolitical rivalry between imperialist powers. Business secretary Grant Shapps has blocked the sale of microchip firm Newport Wafer Fab to Nexperia, a Chinese-owned company, on national security grounds. He has ...

Editorial of the Socialist issue 1205 The ‘Winter of Discontent 2022’ is on. Forty-four years after millions of workers went on strike in the one of the biggest periods of struggle since the 1926 General Strike, the phrase has continued to haunt the bosses and the capitalist establishment. Like then, the current strike wave, building by the week, has been ...

Warning: This review contains a spoiler By Joe Fathallah, Cardiff West Socialist Party Snowpiercer is an American science fiction series broadcast by Netflix in the UK, starring the likes of Daveed Diggs, Jennifer Connolly, and Sean Bean. It is mostly set in 2026, seven years after a quick-fix attempt to stop climate change through chemical injection into the atmosphere backfires ...

By John Williams, Unite Wales Young Members’ Committee (personal capacity) Young workers and trade unionists joined a lively protest outside Starbucks in Cardiff. Members of Unite the Union and the Bakers Union and supporters have mobilised in over 50 cities and towns to protest in solidarity with strikers in the USA who are striking against low pay and poor working ...

Fight for democratic public ownership of social media By Joe Fathallah, Cardiff East Socialist Party Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest billionaire, has completed the takeover of micro-blogging platform Twitter for a sum of $44 billion. The New York Stock Exchange reported on 20 October that trading in Twitter’s shares had been suspended, with the reason “merger effective”. Musk himself ...

A socialist solution is necessary Editorial of the Socialist issue 1200 The final days of the Truss-led Tory government revealed a deeper than ever, jaw-dropping level of crisis in the Tory party. Following the total collapse of Liz Truss’s shortest ever Tory leadership, the party’s MPs were again thrown back to looking for the least potentially disastrous new leader they ...

Editorial of the Socialist issue 1199 written before the resignation of Truss but confirmed by subsequent events After twelve years of Tory-led governments lining the pockets of the richest and inflicting austerity on the majority, the Tories are reaching the end of the road. This Tory government is melting down in front of our eyes. Truss is on her way ...

By Bea Gardner How will we afford to keep the heating on? This is a question facing thousands of working-class households this winter, even after the government’s colossal energy bosses bailout. The poorer you are, the hardest you are hit by rising costs. Real inflation is far higher for the working class than it is for those with bigger incomes ...