Socialist Appeal

Welfare ‘reform’ and David Freud’s defection to the Tories

By Fred McDowell

Wednesday, 18 February 2009

The welfare ‘reform’ measures currently wending their way through Parliament are so right wing you might have thought they were drafted by the Tories. Funny you should mention it...David Freud, who drafted the White Paper on which the bill is based, has just defected to the Conservatives. This shows two things:

He’s a rat leaving what he sees as a sinking ship

New Labour sucking up to the Tories with anti-working class policies just paves the way for the real thing to take over and put the boot in further.

Scottish political perspectives

By Patrick Orr and Ewan Gibbs
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
Poor old Alex Salmond. Things haven't been going too well for him lately. Maybe it was one too many whiskeys with their Burns Suppers, but the Scottish National Party Government seems to be stumbling from one embarrassment to another. First they couldn't get their “recession beating” budget passed on the first go. Then they were forced to back down on their flagship policy to scrap council tax, apparently due to a lack of “parliamentary consensus”. And then, just to add insult to injury Iain Gray, the Scottish Labour Party leader, slammed the SNPs plans for an independence referendum.

Bologna Process – a password for privatisation

By Joe Boustead
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
Coupled to the Bologna Process, though not explicitly included in it, has been the privatisation of education and all that this entails. So now not only are students faced with the fact that they will have to work harder and longer hours for a shorter period of time, that the costs of their education will also increase (so working on top of the hours required for studying becomes more of a strain) but also that their courses may end up being influenced by some company who’s only real interest in to create profit out of the process…

The Ridley Report. How the Tories planned to take on the miners and the working class

By Anthony Healy
Monday, 16 February 2009
Today, almost 25 years since the miners’ strike began, the industry has been decimated, with only a few thousand jobs left. The proud traditions remain as the Durham Miner’s Gala demonstrates each year, and many miners have taken their fighting traditions into the wider labour movement. But many of the pit villages are crumbling and the social effects may never be completely overcome, on the basis of capitalism. But this destruction wasn’t an ‘act of god’ or some huge work of nature like the tsunami. This was a deliberately worked out plan. It was an attempt to take on and smash the most militant determined and class conscious section of the organised labour movement. And this was seen as a critically important task by the ruling class ad their chosen instrument, the Tory Party. It even had a name, the Ridley Report.

Glasgow Occupations - Balance Sheet

By Ewan Gibbs
Monday, 16 February 2009
Over the course of a cold February week two Glasgow campuses emerged at the forefront of the wave of occupations that is currently engulfing universities across Britain and, in the process, transforming their political atmospheres. Strathclyde and Glasgow University were both occupied, with the occupiers protesting about the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and their universities’ links with arms companies that were complicit in the offensive.