Brazilian workers are calling for internationalist brigades to defend Venezuela from US attack, reports WT WHITNEY JR
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'Unions need to broaden our horizons — and become the political leadership in this country'
DOUG NICHOLLS, who is stepping down as GFTU general secretary, talks to Morning Star editor Ben Chacko about the lessons of a lifetime in struggle
Doug Nicholls is retiring as GFTU general secretary
The US reprisal of global nuclear proliferation, threatening a new arms race, could push the world to the brink of annihilation, warns SOPHIE BOLT of CND
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY ask how an 80-tonne whale that lives 200 years is so resistant to cancer
October 2025 was another Black History Month. Has Britain learned anything – or are we going backwards, asks CLAUDIA WEBBE
Real action is needed to make sure tragedies like that at Huntingdon never happen again. TSSA leader MARYAM ESLAMDOUST suggests some practical, achievable steps to be taken
VINCE MILLS sizes up the problems facing Your Party north of the border as it grapples with a range of policies, including its approach to Scottish independence
MARK SERWOTKA issues a rallying call to those committed to building a new radical socialist party of the working class to commit to real democracy, not imaginary or performative gestures
Having been general secretary, first at the Community and Youth Workers Union and then at General Federation of Trade Unions, since 1987, you are retiring as Britain’s longest-serving general secretary. There have been significant changes in the movement over that time. What do you see as some of the strengths and weaknesses?
Unions are now more popular than at any time I have known. The public are behind the pay struggles in ways they never have been before. Remember in 1976 the big unions and TUC called a conference to argue that there should be pay restraint to avoid a spiral of inflation. No-one believes these days that higher wages are to blame for the cost of living crisis.
There’s ebb and flow of overt struggle but I’m minded of what one of the leaders of the revolt in 1381 said: “In time of peace, be not all men at war with them that be rich.”
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