Present-day schools teach failure more than they teach anything else. They are inefficient at teaching knowledge.

A recent survey found that MPs and business bosses, despite mostly having had many years of schooling, can’t work out the probability of getting a head and a tail when a coin is tossed twice; and we all know that many of them cannot write adequate English.

Yet, by the time they have finished school, most young people will have had one big idea drummed into them: that they are failures.

If you want to know the truth about North Korea there can be no better starting point than this excellent book by award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney.

North Korea is one of the most repressive and totalitarian states in the world, but it is a state as bizarre as it is repressive — like a Kafkaesque nightmare combined with Orwell's 1984 and Alice in Wonderland.

“You’re the mockingjay, Katniss. While you live, the rebellion lives...”

Even though it’s a cliché, I did laugh and I did cry while watching Catching Fire, the thrilling second instalment of the film series based on Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy.. It was amusing, emotionally-touching, and it really can set a fire in your belly.

A workplace bulletin for Lewisham Hospital workers, by Lewisham Hospital workers.

Click here to download the PDF.

A decade ago the Scottish Sunday Herald had a circulation of over 60,000. But now it has sunk lower than 25,000. A decade ago Paul Hutcheon was an investigative reporter. But now he just hunts with the pack.

Could the decline in the paper’s circulation be related to the decline in the quality of its journalism?

“Leading Labour MSP Urged to Resign After Taking Part in Unite Demo Outside Director’s House,” read the headline above an article by Hutcheon last Sunday.

Young people are being used as a battering ram to attack the pay, conditions, and rights of all working-class people. Despite the supposed upturn in the UK economy, youth unemployment — especially long-term youth unemployment — remains at record levels.

In the third quarter of this year (July-September), the unemployment rate for those aged between 16 and 24 and not in full-time education was 19% — 664,000 people, many of whom would still be looking for their first job.

Andy Shallice, an socialist activist based in Sheffield, spoke to Solidarity about the background to David Blunkett’s recent attacks on Roma migrants living in Page Hall, Sheffield.

In the original Radio Sheffield interview Blunkett did [about frictions between Roma and other communities living in Page Hall] there were no quotes about race riots.

We have been waging a campaign against work accidents which are rampant in Turkey.

Central to the campaign is a petition to be finally submitted to parliament. Hundreds of UID-DER activists worked hard during the campaign which has the main slogan: “Work Accidents are not Destiny, Stop Workers Dying of Work Accidents!”

During the campaign about 500,000 people have been contacted face to face. We have already surpassed our specific goal which was 100,000 signatures.

The “personal” problems of Paul Flowers, former chairman of the Co-operative Bank, have created a major political storm.

The Tory press has been scandalised by revelation that Flowers bought and used Class A drugs. Flowers had had to resign as a local councillor over other problems, and had a record of dubious expenses claims.

Earlier this year, the Co-op announced that it had made a pre-tax loss of over £709 million, with the profits it had made in its supermarkets wiped out by bad debts in its banking arm.

After a spike because of the 2011 public sector pensions dispute, the level of strikes in the UK fell to a seven-year low in 2012.

Royal Mail, a key bastion of public sector unionism and industrial strength, was privatised in October 2013 without any effective resistance. A strike planned for 4 November was called off and anyway was called after the privatisation had gone through.