The Tories introduced the 50% strike ballot threshold to make industrial action harder. MATT WRACK argues that a Labour government has no justification for leaving it on the statute book
TORY Britain, 2020. The great thing about our country is that everywhere you look there are folk organising to help each other. At work, in the community, in churches, neighbourhood groups, trade unions, schools, food banks and clothes banks and universities.
The question is how to tie all this spontaneous activity together into a movement for real change. It is no longer time to play the usual rules of politics. And it’s certainly not the time to abstain on one Tory proposal after another. It’s time to resist.
The statistics are stark: 1.9 million emergency food parcels; 4.3 million children and 1.9 million pensioners living in poverty; 17,000 deaths a year caused by cold housing; over a million households in desperate need of social housing, with 100,000 waiting for more than ten years; 4 million people living below the breadline, despite working, and a 141 per cent increase in people living on the streets since 2010.
Economists estimate extreme poverty could be drastically reduced for a fraction of global defence spending, yet military budgets continue to expand year on year, says JON TRICKETT MP, ahead of the Stop the War International Conference on Saturday
If we can tackle the big issues, like delivering decent public services and affordable state-built and owned housing by making the richest pay a fair amount of tax, Labour can win back the trust and support of the electorate, argues ANDY McDONALD MP
We cannot refuse to abolish the unjustifiable two-child benefit cap that pushes children into poverty while finding billions of pounds for defence spending — the membership and the public expect better from Labour, writes JON TRICKETT MP
Climate justice and workers’ rights movements are uniting to make the rich pay for our transition to a green economy, writes assistant general secretary of PCS JOHN MOLONEY, ahead of a major demonstration on September 20


