|
By Steve Jones
|
|
Tuesday, 01 April 2008 |
 May 1st, May Day, will see one of the tightest and most important
elections to hit London for some years. The election of London Mayor is
being hotly contested between Ken Livingstone for Labour and Boris
Johnson for the Tories.
|
|
|
By Steve Higham
|
|
Monday, 31 March 2008 |
 125 years ago, on March 14th 1883, Karl Marx died. Marx was a
revolutionary above all else. His most celebrated scientific discovery
explains how the working class is exploited under capitalism. Where does profit come from? This is the
central mystery of economics, a mystery that was solved by Marx in his
most famous work, Capital.
|
|
|
By Socialist Appeal
|
|
Monday, 31 March 2008 |
 The nineteenth century was an era of price
stability. It was also the age of the gold standard. Inflation can have many
triggers, but it always involves an increase in money emissions at some point
in order to give expression to higher prices. It is difficult to increase the
money supply quickly if you have to mine precious metals, so runaway inflation
just didn’t happen back then. The government can’t really control inflation.
Now it’s back!
|
|
|
By Socialist Appeal
|
|
Friday, 28 March 2008 |
Socialist Appeal 161 is out now!
|
|
|
By Dan Morley
|
|
Friday, 28 March 2008 |
 In a bizarre but brilliant turn of editorial line, BBC’s
Newsnight has launched an apparently socialist documentary series on China. At
least, that was how it appeared on the basis of Paul Mason’s excellent report
on Wednesday 26th March, to be followed up the following week.
|
|
|
By a Socialist Appeal Reporter
|
|
Friday, 28 March 2008 |
|
At a meeting in London on 13th March a couple of
hecklers were attacking John McDonnell for being a member of the Labour Party.
Veteran trade unionist Harry Whittaker answered them in his typically
forthright Scottish manner. He said: “What would a working man do if he had
spent years building himself a house only to find it had become infested by
rats? Would he give up his home and move elsewhere, leaving the house
completely in the control of the rats? Of course not! He would never give in to
the rats; he would fight them and he would not rest until he had rid his house
of the last vestige of this verminous infestation. And this is exactly the same
course of action which the true socialist must take with the House of
Labour."
|
|
|
By Socialist Appeal Editorial Board
|
|
Thursday, 27 March 2008 |
 We
need to take over the banks to bring order out of chaos and growth out of
stagnation. In future months we will be urged for the need to nationalise
loss-making financial institutions. We are not just interested in nurturing
losses. Those who incurred the losses can look after them – and that’s not us.
We need to take over the lot. We need to separate the fat cats from their wads.
We need to run the banks in our interests as part of a socialist plan. We need
to run them under democratic workers’ control and management. And we need to
start organising ourselves to do this now.
|
|
|
By John Gandy
|
|
Thursday, 27 March 2008 |
Imagine you have a known terrorist in your custody. He holds
the information that could be used to disarm a bomb. With this information you
can save the lives of thousands, perhaps millions of innocent people. But he
will not give you the information. What do you do?
|
|
|
By Kenny McGuigan
|
|
Wednesday, 26 March 2008 |
The Roman Catholic Church and other religious bigots are demanding a
‘conscience’ vote for MPs voting on the embryology bill to regulate stem
cell research. Socialists may wonder why it has taken Labour MPs eleven
years in office to grow a conscience. In reality the bigots want the
right to blackmail Parliament and foist their prejudices on the rest of
us. Kenny McGuigan deals with the ethical and scientific arguments for
and against embryology research.
|
|
|
By Michael Roberts
|
|
Wednesday, 26 March 2008 |
 World stock markets are still reeling from yet another shock to the
system brought on by the so-called credit crunch that has enveloped capitalist
financial markets since last summer. The latest shock was the biggest yet. Late on Sunday night, 16 March, the US
Federal Reserve Bank announced that Bear Stearns, America’s fifth-largest investment
bank, was bust.
|
|
|
By Mick Brooks
|
|
Wednesday, 26 March 2008 |
 The Chinese have a saying and curse – may you live in
interesting times. The financial crisis and credit crunch are certainly
interesting times. But how do these complex shenanigans impact on the real
economy?
We are experiencing a crisis in what is called the monoline
business in the USA where banks are set to
write down more than $200 billion of their assets. Kissing goodbye to all that
money brings a banking collapse so much closer. $2.4 trillion in loan
guarantees have been called into question.
|
|
|
By Ewan Gibbs and Patrick Orr, School Students Against the War
|
|
Tuesday, 25 March 2008 |
Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets to
mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and to stand against the
ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. These demonstrations come as the
US is piling the pressure on its NATO allies to commit more troops, and send
more into combat on the front line.
|
|
|
By Rob Sewell
|
|
Tuesday, 25 March 2008 |
Margaret Thatcher was recently asked what she regarded as
her legacy. She replied with a smile, “Tony Blair”.
As world capitalism lurches into a deepening economic crisis
and world stock markets tumble, members of the Brown government, the continuers
of Blairism and New Labour, are more eager than ever to extol the virtues of millionaire
capitalism.
|
|
|
By Andy Blake, CWU
|
|
Thursday, 20 March 2008 |
 On Wednesday 19th March . 19 Labour MPs voted against the plan with the
Tory hypocrites and many more abstained. Some voted out of principle
and some to save their miserable hides at the next election. For this is
a plan that nobody (except the jackals of big business) wants. Four
million signed the petition to save the post offices. They were ignored.
The government is now recommending the county councils take over the
threatened branches. They are commemorating Easter by imitating Pontius
Pilate. The fight is still on to stop this vandalism.
|
|
It is easy to write off Boris Johnson as a buffoon. There is
a real danger he will be running London, a city of 7½ million people in a
couple of months time. Make sure Johnson is not made London’s Mayor in the May
1st elections. As Compass points out, “his buffoonery conceals a
hard line right wing set of views – a type of Norman Tebbitt in clown’s
uniform. The quotes below are taken from their pamphlet Boris Johnson – a man of the Tory hard right.
