ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Marketization: How Capitalist Exchange Disciplines Workers and Subverts Democracy
Ian Greer and Charles Umney
Bloomsbury £12.99
POOR pay may be the immediate catalyst for the strikes gripping the NHS but it is clear that nurses and ambulance staff are in the vanguard of a broader struggle to save universal healthcare from creeping marketisation.
The introduction of market mechanisms over decades underpins the new militancy of organisations such as the Royal College of Nurses alongside other unions who are fighting not just to improve their conditions but also to ensure quality services and safety.
MARTIN GRAHAM welcomes, with reservations, a scholarly addition to the unfinished business of understanding how capital works on a world scale
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes, and recommends a a candid, evidence-based record of Britain’s role in the slaughter visited by Israel upon the Palestinians
DAVID MATTHEWS looks at what a collective future for welfare might have in store for us
Speaking to a CND meeting in Cambridge this week, SIMON BRIGNELL traced how the alliance’s anti-communist machinery broke unions, diverted vital funds from public services, and turned workers into cannon fodder for profit



