In the wake of Ann Widdecombe’s murder, JOHN GREEN wonders whether the government will really get to grips with the root cause of these attacks on our MPs
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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
Despite the screeching from the right-wing media, Burnham’s speech chimed with the public mood - and socialists should take advantage, says Morning Star editor BEN CHACKO
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
Rising temperatures and human activity are making life far harder for these vital pollinators. ALEX DITTRICH explains
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners co-founder MIKE JACKSON talks to Matt Kerr about the enduring power of Pride, protest and trade unionism
Behind the language of military strategy is a confrontation that risks drawing the wider Middle East into war, says STEVE BISHOP
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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