Seven reasons to march in Haringey
Join the demo on Wednesday 7 February – we can stop this shocking privatisation.
Review: Student Revolt by Matt Myers
Nick Evans reviews a new oral history of Britain’s 2010 youth uprising against fees and EMA cuts. “It’s just a point in a line of history, but for me it’s absolutely the beginning. It’s point zero.” Charlotte Gray “For me, Millbank was about collective power.” Natalie Graham “Look. Tomorrow and the day after a lot […]
Against the academy: parents and teachers protest primary school conversion
OpenEye Film met the Avenue primary school parents fighting the conversion of the school into an academy.
Five estate agent euphemisms that can go to hell
Welcome to the ever-worsening Housing Crisis! Want to rent a room that’s relatively comfortable with working appliances for a price that you can actually afford? Don’t be ridiculous. Kate Bradley reports from her recent house hunting. The former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne recently introduced laws to help new home-buyers get their ‘foot on […]
Video: Free Education Now demonstration 15 November 2017
Watch interviews and speeches from the march against university tuition fees and the costs of living for students on 15 November 2017.
A silent march for Grenfell, in pictures
A silent march to commemorate the Grenfell disaster. Photos by Steve Eason Repeat marches are scheduled to take place on the 14th of each month.
Living with depression under capitalism
Kate Bradley looks at her experience of depression, the interplay of austerity and mental health problems, and the ambivalent role of state services
On the march for working people’s housing
The growing campaign against privatising council homes in Haringey shows an alternative to privatisation and gentrification, writes Colin Wilson. Over 350 people joined a lively march through north London on Saturday against the privatisation and demolition of Haringey council homes. As the march headed down Green Lanes, a busy shopping district, marchers’ chants, drums and […]
Join this march – stop social cleansing in London
This Saturday will see an important protest over housing and gentrification in London, writes Colin Wilson. If you can, come and join the march. It won’t be news to people reading this report that council housing is under attack in London. The Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle, in the south of the city, was […]
Manchester housing workers to reballot after three months of strikes
On the last day of three months’ of strike action, culminating in a four-week continuous strike, Unite activist Ian Allinson interviewed Unite UCATT steward Bill Nugent about the dispute at Mears / Manchester Working Limited and comments on the dispute It’s not often that workers take this level of action. After striking three days’ a […]
Manchester housing maintenance workers strike
Report from the ongoing Manchester strike for pay parity and against housing maintenance on the cheap
Grenfell and the instrumentalisation of suffering
The traumatised Grenfell community is being treated as a security problem
Anger at the scene of the Grenfell Tower fire
Residents, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn respond to the horrific fire
‘There are no foreigners here except the bosses’: Precarious workers strike back
Leo Zeilig, author of An Ounce of Practice (Hoperoad, 2017), describes recent precarious workers’ strikes at the University of London. By eight in the morning on Tuesday last week it had already been raining for a few hours. I had turned up early for the strike and stopped on my way to the picket-line in […]
Interview: The Fight for Fair Pay in Universities
‘Fractionals’ are hourly paid part-time teaching staff in universities who are paid a ‘fraction’ of a full-time salary. An increasing proportion of academics are on these precarious contracts. On 8 May, SOAS Fractionals for Fair Play (FFFP) announced via their Facebook page that, after threatening a mass marking boycott in late March, management had accepted all of […]
After the May 4 elections: time to shift the terrain
The May 4 local election results contain a lesson for activists in the run-up to the June General Election.
Defend Malia Bouattia
Lisa Leak argues that socialists should back Malia Bouattia in her bid for re-election as President of the National Union of Students. This week’s conference of the National Union of Students will be a quiet litmus test for British radical politics. The main focus will be the NUS presidential election, which will pit the incumbent […]
‘End investment in fossil fuels’ occupation at King’s College London
Students at Kings College are occupying part of the Strand Campus in order to pressure management to divest from fossil fuels
Fighting for the NHS, a moment for Corbynism
Rob Owen reflects on the largest demonstration for the NHS in recent memory.
Whose NHS? #ourNHS
Thousands of people are making their way to London to demonstrate for the NHS, to say no to cuts, closures and privatisation. This march brings together NHS users and workers who want to resist the government’s constant erosion of services, funds and morale within the NHS. This winter has been the hardest ever for the NHS. […]
Haringey, North London – the Front Line Against Gentrification.
Haringey council, a Labour stronghold in north London is planning to sell off huge swathes of council land and property to private developers.
Learning and unlearning: how does the radical left build its understanding?
How does the radical left build its understanding? Who are the theorists? Sølvi Qorda makes the case for Vygotskian pedagogy as a way of understanding our problems and also of finding better cultures to replace them. For many of us, school is a humiliating experience made worse by testing. Upon leaving compulsory education, this experience […]
H.M. Prison Holloway is closed. What will become of the space?
Samuel Agbamu tells the story of North London’s H.M. Prison Holloway and explains why it is a key site of struggle in the fight against social cleansing, as well as institutionalised sexism and racism. Credit: Aoife Greenham Holloway prison has a long and dark history. Opened in 1852 as a mixed gender prison, it became a […]
revolutionary reflections | Towards a Socialist Health Service
The crisis in the NHS has never been greater and resistance is taking new forms as we have seen with the Junior Doctors and Student Nurses. In this piece Mike Downham reflects on his experience as a paediatric doctor in Newcastle in the 1970s to explore what a socialist health service might look like. Dedication […]
Durham Teaching Assistants – an inspiring struggle
Durham Teaching Assistants in UNISON are fighting against plans to cut their pay by 23% – plan backed up with a threat from the Labour Council to dismiss all 2700 of them and make them apply for their own jobs on worse contracts. Megan Charlton, secretary of the Durham Teaching Assistants’ Activists Committee, explains what […]
South African students resume their fight – and face repression
The last few months have seen protests erupt in universities across South Africa. Ashley Fataar, from the South African organisation Keep Left, reports. In September students at universities across South Africa began demonstrating for the complete removal of university fees for poor students. The protests erupted when the minister responsible for higher education announced that […]
500 march in Wellington, Shropshire to defend the NHS
Pete Gillard reports 500 people braved torrential rain on Saturday to march through Wellington, Shropshire in defence of the NHS. Local health bosses have long wanted to close one of Shropshire’s two A&Es and an acute hospital in an area that covers over three times the size of Greater London. At a secret meeting a […]
Motivation: a poem by Caliban’s Revenge
Caliban’s Revenge reflects on the state of teaching today MOTIVATION They told me to be “CUSTOMER CENTERED” So I left work and went to the American style mall and got a second job in Argos. I worked there for a week Nobody noticed Until I had a teaching observation and got “unsatisfactory”. They said no, we […]
Tories trouble families
Caliban asks how did the Tories’ Troubled Families project aimed at addressing what they saw as the cause of the 2011 riots get on? Five years since the riots this week. Interesting fact- you remember the government blaming the riots on “broken families” and launching a scheme to “turn them around”? You remember them announcing […]
Junior Doctors vote No
Medical student Sophie Walton discusses the latest developments in the Junior Doctors’ contract dispute. Junior doctors in England have voted not to accept the contract negotiated earlier this year. 42% voted for, 58% voted against, on a 68% turnout. Dr Johan Malawana, chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) Junior Doctors’ Council, resigned when the […]