Yes, We Can Afford Pay Rises
There’s plenty of money available for the Tory government to give workers pay rises – but they are too busy funnelling it into the pockets of the rich.
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Rae Deer is an economist and freelance writer.
There’s plenty of money available for the Tory government to give workers pay rises – but they are too busy funnelling it into the pockets of the rich.
By December 1984, Britain’s miners had been on strike for nine months – but local and international solidarity brought them everything from turkeys to children’s toys, and stopped even Thatcher from crushing their festive spirit.
They were hospitalised fighting wildfires in summer. They drove ambulances and moved the bodies of the deceased during Covid. Now they’re being offered yet another real-terms pay cut. That’s why the FBU is balloting on strike action.
Public ownership isn’t just more effective, it’s more democratic – it’s time to take vital services like rail, mail, energy, and water out of the control of remote CEOs and unaccountable shareholders.
Postal workers have played a vital role in communities for centuries – but now that’s under existential threat from a corporate leadership hell-bent on turning Royal Mail into another Uber. We can’t let that happen.
Amid a global wave of interest in Korean culture, Korean writers have created some of the most striking politicised fiction of the last few years.
Newly reissued, Bertolt Brecht and Slatan Dudow’s 1932 film Kuhle Wampe is one of the true classics of socialist cinema, offering a glimpse of the last moment before the German left were crushed by Nazism.
Not for the first time, Russian imperialism is casting a shadow over the country’s literature. But the last work of Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad, provided both a mirror and an indictment.
Despite doomed patrician attempts to shut it out, noise can never entirely be avoided — and a level of ‘social noise’ is part of convivial life.
Immediately after World War Two and just before McCarthyism, ten Communists commissioned a modernist, racially integrated housing co-operative in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of L.A.
During the tumultuous years after the end of World War Two, Tribune’s editorial team advocated an alternative to both American and Soviet domination: a democratic socialist ‘third force’.
Britain’s childcare system is appallingly expensive, complicated, and neglected – but for a time in the Second World War, public nurseries were considered part of the new welfare state.
A new film depicts the story of a Soviet architectural ‘UFO’ in Kyiv, which still stands as both a resistance to Stalinist philistinism and wild capitalism.
A new speculative fiction about a revolutionary near future takes the form of an oral history project with inhabitants of the New York Commune, and imagines how abolitionist theories might play out in practice.
Owen Hatherley interviews Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker about his upbringing, his politics — and what he kept that others might have thrown away.
Avtar Singh Jouhl, the former president of the Indian Workers’ Association, passed away in October. He was a committed anti-racist and trade unionist, inviting Malcolm X to Britain and sending coaches of IWA members to support the miners’ strike in 1984.
In L8, the South Liverpool Tribune Reading Group is organising political education to help a diverse working-class community fight decades of government neglect.
The divide between rich and poor in the London borough of Newham illustrates the grotesque inequalities of the city – but long-neglected residents are organising against corporate takeover.
For decades, politicians justified funnelling money to the rich by arguing it produces more wealth for everyone else. The evidence is now overwhelming – we were scammed.
With the country in crisis, the Tories have adopted the extremist language of the far-right to scapegoat asylum seekers for their own failures — and we can’t let them succeed.