Solidarity 185, 18 November 2010

Iain Duncan Smith, Tory Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, has published a White Paper, “Universal credit: welfare that works”. Following on from the Comprehensive Spending Review’s cutting of pensions, child benefit and housing benefit, it is another major attack on working class people. Universal credit will replace means-tested benefits including Income Support, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Working Tax Credit with a single payment, made to unemployed and low-paid workers. It is to be introduced in 2013 alongside a new Work Programme. There will also be new benefit regime for the...

Several hundred people attended the annual conference called by Historical Materialism magazine in London on 11-14 November 2010. It showed that there is a wide and lively interest in Marxist ideas among university students and lecturers. One centrepiece was Ben Fine and Dimitrios Milonakis speaking in a Friday evening plenary on their book From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting Boundaries between Economics and other Social Sciences . It was a vigorous knockabout polemic against mainstream academic economics. That economics is skewed, according to Fine and Milonakis, by two...

Phil Woolas, former Immigration Minister in the last Labour government, is in big trouble. As someone who remembers him from Manchester University Labour Club and the National Union of Students in the 1980s, may I go on record as expressing my great pleasure at the scale and nature of his shame? And on behalf of all the children of asylum seekers he had jailed in New Labour’s detention centres, may I hope he lives out his days in isolation and on the crappy minimum wage his government set. Woolas, an MP since 1997, held onto the Oldham East and Saddleworth seat by only 103 votes in the recent...