The FBU’s dispute over pensions escalated last week after the fire minister withdrew a previous offer in the wake of further strikes.

Firefighters in England and Wales held two further solid strikes on Friday 1 November for four and a half hours and a further two hour strike on Monday 4 November. A further strike is planned for Wednesday 13 November.

The Rail, Maritime, and Transport workers’ union (RMT) is balloting London Underground train maintenance workers for strikes and action short of strikes.

The union is trying to stop management imposing unilateral changes to workers’ terms and conditions.

Meanwhile, an all-grades ballot of Tube workers for strikes to demand an end to casualisation, and for workers supplied by agencies, including the 33 previously employed by Trainpeople, to be offered permanent jobs, is due to begin this week.

The Communication Workers Union (CWU) called off a national strike of postal workers, planned for 4 November.

Although the immediate issues balloted over were day-to-day industrial issues including pay and pensions, the CWU explicity placed the ballot in the wider context of its political fight against Royal Mail privatisation. A strike before the 15 October sell-off could have thrown a spanner in the works of privatisation. By delaying calling action, and then calling it off entirely, the CWU allowed the privatisation to go through unresisted.

On 31 October, Higher Education workers in three unions (UCU, Unite, and Unison) struck against a 1% pay offer. Here, we feature snippets from picket lines around the country.

“The consensus from UCU members on the picket line was that there should be a “‘general strike” (their words), by which they meant more coordinated public sector strike action.”

University of Northampton

“There were around a dozen pickets from all three unions at each of the main entrances to University of East Anglia (UEA) all morning.

When it was revealed on 11 October that Malala Yousafzai, the teenage girl that captured the world’s imagination after being shot by a Taliban rifleman, was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it came as a relief.

Malala no doubt deserved it more than any other person in the world, but to tarnish her name by giving her the same prize given to such renowned peacemakers as Henry Kissinger and Menachem Begin would have been a disservice to everything she had stood for.

“Frieze Art Fair” was held in Regent’s Park, London, from 17 to 20 October. Solidarity asked Lisa Le Feuvre, an art curator, about it. The interview started with Lisa putting a question to Solidarity.

Lisa Le Feuvre: My first response would be to ask Solidarity why you are choosing Frieze Art Fair as the impetus to talk about art, given that this is the most commercial side of art?

In this two part documentary, Stephen Fry and the director Fergus O’Brien set out to survey what the situation is for LGBT people around the world.

A laudable task, and a good way to use your celebrity. In some ways the documentary lives up to its good intentions to expose homophobia across the world; the interviews with victims and survivors of some of the most extreme consequences of homophobia moved me.

Western democracies have prided themselves in applying humane standards to the treatment of prisoners of war. This treatment is encapsulated in the Geneva Convention, first formulated in 1864 and modified since, most recently in 1949.

They have also signed up to the UN Convention against Torture.

On 28 October, the Daily Telegraph accused the University of London Union (ULU) of having “banned” representatives of the union from attending the University’s official Remembrance Service.

Quite how the union’s democratic body taking a decision not to officially attend constitutes a “ban” is beyond comprehension. However, what is in danger of being lost here is the debate about the politics of Remembrance, over and above any manufactured “scandal” or constitutional wrangle within ULU’s Senate.

On Friday 18 October, Marxist political philosopher Norman Geras died of cancer at the age of 70. Geras was born in what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1943 and came to England to study at Oxford in 1962. He graduated with a first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1965 and took up a teaching post at Manchester University where he remained for the rest of his academic life, retiring in 2003.