Social and Economic Policy

Can Atalay was elected as the Member of Parliament for Hatay from the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) in the 2023 election. Since 2022, he has been serving an 18-year prison sentence for his involvement in the Gezi Park protests in 2013. We have translated this article from Marxist Tutum. Can Atalay’s court case has bounced back and forth between the Constitutional and Supreme Courts like a tennis ball, but the regime has once more shown its open contempt for the law and the Constitution by finally removing the TİP MP for Hatay from Parliament. Before the reading of the Supreme Court’s verdict...

Before paying the Tory debt it’s worth asking how it was accrued and who should foot the bill. The debt ballooned during 2020-2023 with the government borrowing an additional £400 billion while the country moved in and out of lockdowns. Total debt is now around £2.2 trillion. Tory Britain was both one of the most profligate spenders during the pandemic and achieved some of the worst outcomes. Despite the spending splurge there was surprisingly little spent on effective infection control. The Tory’s top priority was to protect the income and class privilege of the rich. £80 billion was given...

Critical to the replacement of fossil-fuel energy by low-emissions electricity generation (renewables and nuclear) is the expansion of the electricity grid. Since Thatcher’s privatisation, the grid is run by private companies, with the prices they can charge for transmission regulated by an official body, Ofgem. Ofgem is now considering its next round of price controls, and says that it will use the com­pan­ies’ “investabil­ity” as a criterion. It will aim to ensure that the companies not only cover their costs, not only make tidy profits, but make profits lush and reliable enough that their...

At 1pm on 4 January, CEOs of the FTSE 100 top firms had already pocketed more than the middling (median) UK wage for the whole year. According to the High Pay Centre those CEOs are now on an average of £3.81 million a year, and their year-on-year rise at 9.5%, while the middling wage has gone up 6%. Broadening out to bosses at smaller firms, and near-top managers at big firms, the top 1% of UK full-timers are on £145,000 or upwards, and will have overtaken the annual pay of the median full-time worker by 29 March. This inequality is increasing, despite sizeable recent increases in the minimum...

The Conservatives are reaching new lows in their recent lurch to the right. We have had the de facto abandonment of the net-zero target with the postponement of the ending of petrol and diesel car sales and the licensing of new oil drilling in the North Sea. Rishi Sunak has falsely claimed that the Labour Party’s “eco-zealots” plan to tax meat. A government minister has retold the alt-right conspiracy theory that fifteen-minute cities (a reasonable planning goal that people live within easy walking distance of amenities they need) is an attempt to control people’s lives. The underlying...

Despite the wall-to-wall Scottish media coverage of campaigning in the run-up to last Thursday’s Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election, some people on the doorstep nonetheless responded to canvassers with the question: “By-election? What by-election?” Perhaps their source of information (i.e. their source of an absence of information) was Socialist Worker , paper of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Tucked away in a small article on page three of issue 2874 of the paper (27th September) were four short sentences mentioning that the by-election would be taking place and that “media reports”...

On 27 September 17 workers employed by the Iranian company, the National Steel Group, were sentenced to prison and flogging. The trial took place in the southern city of Ahvaz. The workers were charged with, “disrupting public order by inciting disturbance and controversy” and their “crime” was to demand wage increases, and that the company implements the very basic protections provided by Iran’s employment law. The workers can avoid three-month prison terms if they pay fines of 2.5 million tomans (about £40). The fine will be difficult to pay as the working-class has been the main victim of...

On 19 September, the ironically titled Levelling Up Secretary, Michael Gove, announced he would be sending in commissioners to take over the running of Birmingham city council. The commissioners will very likely oversee the plundering of Birmingham, with the sale of council assets such as landmark buildings, jobs cuts, and funding cuts that will massively impact the charity sector. Two observations. One, for years the argument from the Labour Right and the official Left has been that Labour councils shouldn't actually resist implementing austerity (as with Lambeth and Liverpool councils in the...

Activists from Workers' Liberty and supporters of Solidarity will be at Labour Party conference and women's conference, 7-11 October in Liverpool. We'll be there to help the efforts of Free Our Unions, the Labour Campaign for Free Movement, the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, India Labour Solidarity, and other campaigns; to sell literature, seek discussions and contacts. There will be demonstrations for the NHS and for abortion rights on Saturday, for free education on Sunday. And agitation for a block on new North Sea oil and gas fields, following the Tories' decision to "max out" licences in...

Labour’s current policy, as outlined by the National Policy Forum, is hobbled by refusing to tax the rich, beyond closing a few loopholes. A small wealth tax, or even making the tax rate on “unearned” income equal to that on “earned” income, could raise more than enough to fix up the NHS. The Labour leaders’ commitments to retain Tory tax policies, with only marginal tweaks, to stick to arbitrary Tory targets for cutting government debt, and to keep military spending high, mean continued ruination. Inequality of wealth has risen recently in many countries, more than inequality of income...