Recent months have seen an increase in the number of homophobic attacks across the country. Alex Kelby and Jim Parker argue for a militant campaign of resistance Read more...

Since the European elections, a discussion has begun on building a powerful alternative to the Labour Party. Luke Cooper argues for a new party to have a class struggle policy against capitalism Read more...

Marcus Hallaby looks at the controversy surrounding the Abdelbaset Ali al-Mergahi case Read more...

A fight to save 600 jobs at a wind turbine plant threatened with closure exposes Labour’s green fakery. Andy Yorke and Jeremy Dewar back the workers’ demand for nationalisation Read more...

Jack Jones, who has died at the age of 96, cut a very different figure from many of today's union leaders, writes Dave Stockton. Read more...

The British political system has been thrown into its most serious crisis for a generation. Leaked figures over MPs allowances claims reveal the most appalling corruption, leading to an explosion in public anger Read more...

The European elections in Britain have traditionally been the stomping ground of the political right, who use them to whip up jingoistic and nationalist feeling against "Brussels bureaucrats", cheered on by the tabloid media. Luke Cooper asks whether a new trade union led platform will change things this year. Read more...

Guantanamo Bay prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, has finally been released after seven years held without trial by the US authorities. Read more...

Statement of the League for the Fifth International Read more...

Around 3,000 construction workers at oil refineries around Britain are taking wildcat, unofficial strike action. Another 900 workers at Sellafield nuclear power plant may join them on Monday 2 February.
Normally Workers Power would energetically support strike action by workers – including unofficial strikes taken without the formal support of the union leaders.
But this strike is different. We unreservedly oppose it. Read more...

Demonstrations across the country showed the real anger that ordinary people feel about the killings in the Gaza strip. Read more...

How should a revolutionary party organise itself? The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once explained:

"Without internal democracy  no revolutionary education. Without discipline  no revolutionary action. The internal structure of the Fourth International is based on the principles of democratic centralism: full freedom in discussion, complete unity in action." Read more...

The Scottish National Party, under the leadership of Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond, has built up its support since devolution by appealing to disillusioned Labour supporters on the one hand, and forging a close relationship with Scottish capitalists, like former Royal Bank of Scotland chief George Mathewson and Stagecoach head Brian Souter, on the other. Read more...

The hypocrisy of the British state knows no bounds, writes Mark Booth. While drumming up support for a war with Iran, based upon the oppression and barbaric nature of the theocratic regime, the government is intent on deporting Iranian asylum seekers, who face death at the hands of the regime. Read more...

Gordon Brown has ignored the democratic process for the second time since becoming prime minister (the first being his unopposed coronation). By denying the British people a referendum on the European Union Reform Treaty, despite 75 per cent wanting one, he is forcing through the 2000 “Lisbon agenda” to “Americanise” Europe with devastating effects on the working class, the youth, and the poor. This treaty is considered to be 90 per cent the same as the European Constitution voted down by the Dutch and French masses in 2005. Read more...

In early September Respect MP George Galloway circulated a letter to the Respect National Council entitled “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. The letter appears to point to a possible early disintegration of the “Unity Coalition.” Galloway makes a series of bitter complaints about how Respect is run, ranging from complaints over office procedures to accusations of ineptitude in election work and a general lack of accountability and democracy. He ends by warning that Respect may be facing oblivion. Although he does not mention by name the organisation he holds responsible for all this, it is quite obviously the Socialist Workers Party. Read more...

Throughout the 1984 miners’ strike, Workers Power has fought for the TUC to call a general strike. We have argued that it is necessary in order to secure a victory for the miners and to smash the entire Tory offensive that the MacGregor closure plan is merely one part of. We have been justified by events. At the time of writing, the miners have been for three months a focus of solidarity action from militants throughout the labour movement and an encouragement for other sections of workers to go into struggle. If mass solidarity action or a general strike has not yet occurred, it is because of the treachery of the official leaders of our movement, and the cowardice, muddle headedness and confusion of the left reformist and centrist “opposition” to them. To put it bluntly, the TUC has been given a free ride! Read more...

The Socialist Workers Party attracts many young people and workers because of its size and militancy. At Marxism you will hear that it stands for revolutionary politics and building the party, there will be sessions in which the SWP leaders speak about Lenin and Marx and a whole series of famous revolutions. However what is most important is not the political lessons drawn in the meetings rooms at Marxism, but whether they are applied amongst workers in their everyday struggles. Read more...

The collapse in support for Labour has raised the prospect of a victory for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the Scottish Parliament elections in May. Read more...

The origins of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) lie in the programmatic disputes in the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the British section of the Fourth International, in the period after the Second World War. Before his assassination in 1940, Trotsky had anticipated that Stalinism in the Soviet Union would not survive a war with Germany and that the war itself would lead to the kind of revolutionary upsurge that had followed the First World War. In such conditions, the Fourth International, with its record of maintaining the revolutionary tradition of the Bolsheviks and the early Communist International and armed with a programme that called for political revolution in the Soviet Union to regain control of the planned economy and a social revolution based on workers’ councils and workers’ militia in the imperialist countries, would be able to play a similar role to that of the Bolsheviks at the end of the First World War. Read more...

Evidence of the growing discontent with the Labour government was shown on the streets of Manchester on 23rd September, when 50,000 people marched around the Labour Party conference venue, G-Mex. It was the biggest demonstration in Manchester since the Chartists, 150 years ago, and the biggest mobilisation against the Labour Party in its history. Read more...

A day after a Scottish Socialist Party rally in a Glasgow hotel launched its 2007 election campaign before 300 faithful members, Tommy Sheridan booked himself into the same hotel and told twice as many recruits that he was founding a new party called Solidarity. Read more...

The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) has often been held up as a model left unity but it now finds itself in crisis. Read more...

Abolish immigration controls - citizenship for all

31 March 2006 saw around a hundred trade unionists, anti-deportation campaigners and left wing activists come together in Liverpool to discuss how to organise migrant workers and challenge the host of racist immigration controls faced by workers coming into the country. The agenda was a broad one, covering everything from European anti-trafficking legislation, to the struggle of organised migrant cleaners, to local ongoing campaigns, such as the defence of the Sukula family in Bolton. Read more...

An exchange of letters between the Socialist Party (CWI)and Workers Power, British section of the League for the Fifth International, around the issue of the campaign for the new workers party hat had recently been launched. Read more...

In February 1906 the Labour Representation Committee won 29 seats at the general election. It promptly changed its name to the Labour Party. Dave Stockton draws the lessons from its founding years Read more...

The Socialist Workers Party has always rejected the need to build itself on the basis of a revolutionary programme and is now building Respect as a populist electoral alliance, and describing it as “the new party”. Luke Cooper traces the evolution of the SWP and argues that this latest move to the right is firmly rooted in its history of economism and opportunism. Read more...

The recent Gate Gourmet and Rolls Royce disputes have highlighted how Britain’s anti-union laws prevent workers defending themselves. GR McColl looks at how they were imposed Read more...

Since the bombings, and especially since the discovery that the bombers were young British Muslims, the government and the press have tried even more vigorously to keep the question of the war in Iraq out of people’s minds.

Tony Blair, like George Bush, blames the bombings on “evil". He explicitly denies any link to the war: “If it is Iraq that motivates them, why is the same ideology killing Iraqis by terror in defiance of an elected Iraqi government? What was 11th September 2001 the reprisal for?" Read more...

Statement on the London bombings from the League for the Fifth International

The terrorist attack on the London underground and bus services, which has resulted in the death of dozens of people and serious injuries to many others, is an horrific act aimed at innocent people - workers, students, tourists - and deserves the most unequivocal condemnation by all socialists and progressive people. Both the survivors and the families of the victims deserve our deepest sympathy. Read more...