ANDREW MURRAY wonders what the great communist foe of Oswald Mosley would make of today’s far-right surge, warning that while the triumph of Farage and ‘Robinson’ is far from inevitable, placing any faith in Starmer in an anti-fascist front is a fool’s errand
Outsourcing is a public health hazard
It is clear that the shoddy employment practices of the management companies operating in the NHS are putting us all at risk. We need to take all workers back in house today, writes HELEN O'CONNOR
LOTTE COLLETT welcomes the arrival of a new party for the left, a vehicle for councils to finally fight for progressive policies on housing, green spaces and public facilities, rather than administering cuts and misery from central government
KEVAN NELSON reports back from a delegation to the epic celebrations for the anniversary of Vietnam’s 1945 revolution, where British communists found a thriving, prosperous socialist country, brimming with ambition and well-earned national pride
Our economic system is broken – and unless we break with the government’s obsession with short-termist private profit, things are destined to get worse, warns Mercedes Villalba
Following the resignation of Nepali Prime Minister KP Oli amid mass youth-driven protests, different narratives have circulated which simplify and misrepresent the complexities and reality on the ground in Nepal at the roots of this crisis, argue VIJAY PRASHAD and ATUL CHANDRA
The US is desperate to stop Honduras’s process of social and democratic change, writes TIM YOUNG
IT should be obvious that hospitals have the potential to harbour far more germs and disease than most other public buildings. People are admitted to hospital when they are suffering from contagious disease themselves. Hospital patients are susceptible to contracting infections and they can go on to develop additional health complications as a result of increased physical vulnerability.
Preventing cross-infection in hospitals is not only key to patient recovery, it is key to protecting the workforce, so rigorous infection control should be an integral part of the running of a hospital. No-one wants hospital staff to be off sick unnecessarily or for patients or hospital staff to die from hospital-acquired infections. No patient should ever be discharged from a hospital in a worse state than when they were admitted.
The result of years of outsourcing of hospital cleaning means that staff, patients and the public can no longer feel confident that hospitals are cleaned as thoroughly as they should be. When some cleaning staff took up voluntary redundancy at St Georges hospital in 2019, GMB Union was shown pictures of the accumulating dirt and filth including rolls of dust building up underneath hospital beds on wards.
More from this author
As more people on the left are now questioning the sex industry, HELEN O’CONNOR reports from a timely fringe at TUC Congress where women on the front line gave their perspective on why prostitution should never be considered ‘work’
With fascists and their supporters cynically and falsely posing as ‘defenders of women,’ the left must take violence against women seriously and gain a better understanding of women’s oppression, warns HELEN O’CONNOR
As some celebrate a pay rise, outsourced, privatised workers face continued exploitation — ending this injustice by bringing them in-house must become a top priority for the labour movement, writes HELEN O’CONNOR
HELEN O’CONNOR sees a worrying trend of women exiting the labour movement in their thousands, and warns that if this tide is not stemmed with proper and effective action, it will only be to the benefit of the capitalist class
