The Great Strike is less than two weeks away. From headteachers to lollipop ladies, care assistants to university lecturers, hundreds of thousands of workers are set to take part in the biggest co-ordinated industrial action since the 1926 General Strike. The Labour leadership is highly unlikely to back the strike: the best that can be […]
The Left needs to find its voice on the EU
Oct 27th, 2011 by Owen Jones.The EU is seen as that perennial obsession of the Tory right-wing fringes: the sort of issue that excites only bigoted, Daily-Mail-reading Little Englanders who peer suspiciously out of velvet curtains to rant about gay gypsies scrounging off Incapacity Benefit. When Conservative MPs staged the biggest post-war rebellion over Europe over David Cameron’s refusal to […]
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Protest without politics will change nothing
Oct 23rd, 2011 by Owen Jones.My first experience of police kettling was aged 16. It was May Day 2001, and the anti-globalisation movement was at its peak. The turn-of-the-century anti-capitalist movement feels largely forgotten today, but it was a big deal at the time. To a left-wing teenager growing up in an age of unchallenged neo-liberal triumphalism, just to have […]
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Private school parents are wasting their money
Oct 14th, 2011 by Owen Jones.Our comprehensive schools are under attack and barely anyone in public life is defending them. As part of an ideologically charged campaign to strip the state of all but its most basic functions, the Tories are fragmenting the education system by building a patchwork of privately run free schools and academies. Forced into retreat, champions […]
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Britain could be a model unhappy family
Oct 12th, 2011 by Owen Jones.Like so many others, the history of my family straddles the nations of mainland Britain. My father’s north Wales relatives have been Welsh-speaking nationalists for generations. And yet my grandfather was a hero in his village when he joined Britain’s merchant navy at the peak of the empire. A proud Welsh identity meant something very different […]
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Power to the bosses is the Tories’ goal
Oct 7th, 2011 by Owen Jones.Never let a serious crisis go to waste, was the advice of Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. His old boss may have struggled to embrace the wisdom, but it appears to have become a mantra for Conservatives who gathered in Manchester this week. So […]
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We need to start talking about Socialism
Oct 5th, 2011 by Owen Jones.I’ve written enough posts bemoaning the genius of the right in transforming a private sector crisis into a crisis of overspending, Yes, it sucks. I’ve also whinged about the failure of the Labour leadership to offer a coherent alternative to the Tories’ attempt to re-order society even further in the interests of the wealthy than […]
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Millionaires, bankers’ friend, no wonder we have the most right-wing government ever
Oct 4th, 2011 by Owen Jones.You have to admire the Conservatives’ courage as they launch their annual get-together in enemy territory today. Manchester is a Tory-free zone. Not one of them sits on the council and the city hasn’t sent a candidate sporting a blue rosette to Parliament for nearly three decades. The party faithful won’t be rattled by a bit of […]
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Unions of the Future
Sep 23rd, 2011 by Owen Jones.This video of Owen Jones talking about the unions of the future was made by Union News, the new website and (self-proclaimed) active voice for trade unionists.
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We need to remember what we’re for
Sep 22nd, 2011 by Owen Jones.As we approach Labour’s 106th annual conference, it’s worth remembering what Thomas R. Steels envisaged the party was for. Steels was a railway signalman from Doncaster and, in 1899, drafted a motion for his local branch of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants calling for the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee to assemble a congress with the […]
