International Socialists (CWI Scotland)

David Cameron was stoutly defending the 'nation'. This is what he claimed after he was humiliatingly defeated by 26 votes to one at the 9 December EU summit and withdrew from participating in discussions over a new EU treaty. Which nation?

"The scenes of despair and explosions of anger like those of 1981 will be back on our streets. "Deprived areas of major cities - if not the central areas, then the 'banlieus' or outskirts as in France - will be the scene of new conflagrations." This is the warning that the Socialist Party gave just four months ago, in our article on the anniversary of the Brixton riots.

Rioting and widespread looting has engulfed many areas of London and has also spread to Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool. The wellspring for these events are the huge alienation, anger at police repression, poverty and the feeling among many young people that they have no future. Below we print an initial report from the Socialist Party about the events that ignited the riots, the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham. 

In “normal” times the cosy and embedded links between the media, capitalist politicians and the state machine are hidden from the full view of working and middle class people. However, the Murdochgate scandal has exposed the rotten and corrupt underbelly of the capitalist elite to an audience of tens of millions.

'Murdochgate', the News of the World (NoW) scandal, is Britain's Watergate. In politics, as in nature, the 'butterfly effect' operates. A seemingly small event - the famous metaphor of the flutter of a butterfly's wings - can begin a chain of events resulting in massive unforeseen consequences.

Ever since Neil Lennon came to Scotland to play for his boyhood team he has received torrents of abuse. No doubt for a section of bigots, being from Northern Ireland, a Catholic and a Celtic fan is enough to mark him out for this treatment.

Come to the Socialist Party Scotland meetings this week

This was a not a wave, neither a stream nor a river, not even a sea. The more than 500,000 who marched against the savage cuts of the Con-Dem government formed an ocean of humanity in London on Saturday. An ocean that has the potential to become a tsunami that can stop the Con-Dem cutters in their tracks and sweep away this rotten government of the millionaires.

Nobody, apart from the super-rich, can hope to avoid the impact of the government's brutal attacks. If this government gets away with it, the clock of history will be unwound with levels of poverty returning to those of the 1930s. But it will not get away with it. This government is deluded if it imagines it will be able to carry out its programme without meeting an avalanche of opposition.

The Socialist Party Scotland was saddened to learn of the death on 22 December of lifelong Militant/Socialist Party member, John Macreadie.

John died of a brain tumour which he had been fighting for two years. John will be remembered as a committed socialist and advocate of socialist ideas, a courageous class fighter and a militant leader in his work for the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) and the wider trade union and labour movement.

The comprehensive spending review (CSR) announced by the Tory chancellor, George Osborne, on 20 October will be a high-voltage charge of shock therapy for the British economy.It’s based on blind faith that ’fiscal consolidation’ - slashing the state deficit - will spark off a surge of growth led by big business and the rest of the private sector.