News and Analysis

By Ross Saunders RMT members in train fleet maintenance in Wales are planning to begin industrial action this June against a threat to their job security, pensions, pay and terms and conditions. A resounding 98% voted in favour of strike action on an 80% turnout, which should give confidence to union members everywhere that with the right approach it is ...

By Dave Reid “Today is OUR day, May Day is the day for the working class across the world” declared Dave Bartlett, secretary of Cardiff Trades Council to hundreds of trade unionists gathered in Cardiff city centre as he opened the Trades Council’s annual May Day celebration. Led by the Ynyshir brass band they marched through Cardiff in glorious sunshine ...

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 ...

By Gareth Bromhall In the early hours of 26th April the town of Port Talbot was rocked by a large explosion that residents report sounded like a bomb and woke many across the community. The incident at the local Tata Steel plant, that employs thousands and maintains thousands more across the area, was caused by the spillage of molten metal ...

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 ...

By Dave Reid   It’s a cloudy Monday March morning in Merthyr and on the streets there are a steady flow of people going about their Monday morning business. Merthyr has received a bad press as the “benefit capital of Britain” and The Mirror pointed out the average male life expectancy on one of the estates is lower than Haiti’s, ...

By Hannah Sell The minority Tory government faces a historic crisis, hanging on by a thread. Theresa May has lost an unprecedented series of votes in parliament, her party utterly split on Brexit. A snap general election could be called any time. These are critical times for the workers’ movement and Labour’s left-wing leadership. Three-and-a-half years ago, four months after ...

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 Gareth Bromhall Build a movement to challenge the profit systemBuild mass walkouts on 15 March “We have not come here to beg the world leaders to care for our future. They have ignored us in the past and they will ignore us again. “We have come here to let them know that change is coming whether they like it or not. ...