Mark L Thomas

Millions of workers in Britain face an onslaught across multiple fronts: the pandemic, the rising wave of jobs cuts, pay freezes, and “fire and rehire” assaults on pay and conditions. The single most salient feature (or better still, problem) in the situation is the huge gulf that exists between this onslaught and the, to say the least, limited response coming from the top of the unions.

It was good to see the engagement in the letters pages of last month’s Socialist Review to my and Andy Ridley’s article about the turmoil in the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) which has followed from discontent over this year’s NHS pay deal (“A right royal crisis prods dormant unions to life”, November SR).

Thanks to Pete Sinclair for his clarifications and insights about the limitations of the deal and to Dave Lyddon for his informative comments about the historical evolution of the RCN.

The results of the local elections in England last month were decried as a failure for Corbyn and Labour by the Tories, with much of the media coverage taking this as their cue. The usual suspects among Corbyn’s opponents on the Labour right were quick to add their voices suggesting that “peak Corbyn” had been reached.

In reply, the Labour left robustly defended the results as an untrammelled success for Labour and another step towards Downing Street for Corbyn.

But neither of these interpretations really capture what the local elections actually point to.

Michelangelo stood at the very pinnacle of the Renaissance. The revolutionary ideas of the Renaissance were based on novel ways of living which in turn gave rise to powerful new forms and techniques of artistic expression.

The Tories’ new Trade Union Act, which passed through parliament last year, is due to come into legal effect this month. The new restrictions it contains, above all thresholds for strike ballots, will further curtail the legal space for strikes.

Public sector pay has moved to the centre of political debate. This poses a pivotal question — will the new confidence inside the left and the wider labour movement move beyond the ballot box and the Labour Party and into an increased level of struggle in the workplace?

The summer was dominated by the bitter fight over the Labour leadership. The majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) gambled that the Brexit vote could be used to launch an onslaught on Jeremy Corbyn, who they deemed insufficiently enthusiastic for the Remain cause after he refused (rightly) to campaign alongside pro-Remain Tories or drop his entirely justified criticisms of the EU. The aim was to force Corbyn to resign without risking a vote by the Labour membership.

The government has stumbled into a key trial of strength with junior doctors, who by the end of April had taken five rounds of escalating strikes, including a full walkout without cover. As the BBC’s health correspondent wrote after the full walkout, “this is going to be a fight to the bitter end…both sides have been briefing about how determined they are not to give ground. But who will break first? Ministers or doctors?” The answer will have far reaching consequences.

Some books are wrong, but in interesting ways. This is such a work.

Mike Savage and a team of colleagues were the authors of the Great British Class Survey, which they claim as the biggest ever survey of class in Britain with over 161,000 respondents. This book draws on the survey together with a series of revealing interviews about how people perceive and experience class in modern Britain.

Why isn’t Labour a shoo-in for May’s general election? The Conservative-LibDem coalition has driven through the biggest onslaught on public services, the welfare state and workers’ wages in decades, yet Labour has been unable to develop anything close to a convincing lead over the Tories, and in some polls even falls behind them. As a result, the outcome of the general election remains very unpredictable.