Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
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Minimum service levels: an echo of Mussolini?
ADRIAN WEIR sees sinister parallels in the Tories’ latest anti-union plans
AUTHORITARIAN: Rail is just one area where minimum service levels will apply, according to the new plans
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
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NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
APPARENTLY, a theoretical justification for the Tory anti-union laws stretching back to the Thatcher years in the 1980s was to make real Friedrich Hayek’s nostrum, set out in the Road to Serfdom, that to be free a state had to the break the union monopoly over the terms on which labour is supplied.
It is almost ironic therefore that Grant Shapps, aka Michael Green, is assuming that after 40 years of anti-union laws unions still maintain some sort of monopoly of coercive power over their members when he seeks to impose his minimum service levels; he obviously believes that unions can switch on and off at will the supply of labour in any given sector.
The only person in this sorry episode of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill who is using coercive powers is the Secretary of State himself.
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