Scottish Labour's leaders cannot keep blaming Westminster for the collapse at the ballot box, says VINCE MILLS
Latest editorial
Britain’s benefit sanctions are beyond cruel
Punishing those in need doesn’t work from any perspective — that is why the Tory government is refusing to allow access to its own data. It is clear that we need a total overhaul of the system, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP
Over 30 years since apartheid was abolished, nasty anti-migrant rhetoric sweeps the corporate media. The Commnunist Party is ready to fight back, says ROGER McKENZIE
Over 100,000 people are expected on Brussels’s streets today. Ben Chacko speaks to Belgian Workers Party’s PETER MERTENS on wage and pensions attacks that have united the fightback
FRED BAYER says the cuts to the congress cycle could be disastrous for the Scottish trade union movement
Berlin’s Soviet war memorials are becoming the latest front in a political struggle to ‘de-Sovietise’ German history. NICO POPP reports
Western Marxism is a particular version of Marxist theory developed in – and acceptable to – the capitalist nations of Europe and North America and largely divorced from political action, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
IT’S almost five years since the Economic and Social Research Council, a government-funded public body, told the UN’s human rights body that the British government’s drive to extend and intensify benefit sanctions “systematically undermines the very idea of economic and social rights as a core component of national citizenship status and/or justifications for such rights on the basis of universal human needs,” making many benefit claimants unable to meet those basic needs for food, warmth and shelter.
The UN agreed, concluding that despite its denialism, the government was breaching the human rights of benefit claimants at every turn. The UN repeated its call as recently as November 2022.
Despite the clarity of the warnings, the government did nothing to improve its treatment of the most marginalised — in fact, since then the situation has only gone downhill. The number of people suffering sanctions hit record levels in 2022.
Similar stories
DYLAN MURPHY reports that far from helping people back into work, the sanctions regime is inflicting unnecessary trauma on working-class families
CLAUDIA WEBBE argues that Labour gains nothing from its adoption of right-wing stances on immigration, and seems instead to be deliberately paving the way for the far right to become an established force in British politics, as it has already in Europe
While claiming to target fraud, Labour’s snooping Bill strips benefit recipients of privacy rights and presumption of innocence, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE, warning that algorithms with up to 25 per cent error rates could wrongfully investigate and harass millions of vulnerable people