In Part Five of ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’ with no political party willing to seriously oppose Thatcher’s poll tax, millions of ordinary people begin to organise themselves at grassroots level, often inspired by the historic revolutionary events in the former Stalinist countries of Eastern Europe. The town of Northwich was typical of […]

Part Four of ten articles exploring the history of the grass-roots movement against Thatcher’s infamous poll tax. CHRIS ROBINSON looks at the beginning of the fight back. Thatcher’s Tory government introduced the poll tax a year earlier in Scotland following their rejection of ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1987 elections. An acknowledged ‘Labour stronghold’, yet […]

‘A week is a long time in politics,’ former PM Harold Wilson once said. He wasn’t kidding. Three weeks is even longer, especially when you have three wings of the same party doing battle in the dire hope of winning the ‘centre ground’.  For that is what our mainstream politics has […]

To paraphrase that other disastrous Labour Party ‘leader’, Neil (now Lord) Kinnock: ‘Now we have the grotesque chaos of a Labour leader – a Labour leader! – scuttling around trying to pander to a rightwing press agenda and falling flat on his face!’ Less than two years from the next general […]

Here in Britain, 2013, we have one of the weakest, most unstable governments in living memory – certainly since John Major’s time as PM (1990-1997). The humiliating defeat at the Eastleigh by-election saw UKIP push the Tories into third place. A fresh round of knife-sharpening is imminent.  The wolves prepare to devour each other with […]

Aneurin Bevan, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party between 1959-1960 once said ‘‘No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. ..So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.’’ Quite […]

The United Kingdom, or at least parts of it, faces two potential referenda in the near future. The Scots will vote on whether to remain part of the UK in Autumn 2014. Whatever country is left is set to be offered a referendum on European Union membership after the next […]

Watch any TV news report, political show, read any newspaper article, and you will find a common thread amongst our political class across the main parties. ‘We have no money’ they say. ‘The cuts are necessary’. ‘We must reduce the deficit’, and, of course, the phrase that will be hung […]