The new Employment Rights Act is a step forward, but restoring collective bargaining and union power remains essential to tackling insecurity, outsourcing and low pay, says PAUL WHITEHOUSE
IT IS notoriously difficult to describe birds’ songs in words, apart from the those like the cuckoo and chiff-chaff, whose names perfectly describe their songs.
In notes Rosa Luxemburg wrote in prison, she describes in words a number of the bird songs she heard from her cell. Her descriptions are so precise, that it is possible, over 100 years later, to identify the species of birds she was listening to.
Luxemburg was one of the key foundation figures of the socialist movement that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
JOHN REES replies to Claudia Webbe
Hundreds in Berlin gathered on January 15 to honour the US-born socialist who made East Germany his home. Florentine Morales Sandoval reports
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction


