With the added support this time, in a personal capacity, of Brian Caton, the general secretary of the Prison Officers Association (POA), and leading national officers of the PCS civil servants’ union – and with other union figures likely to come on board – the basis exists for a much needed electoral challenge to the right-wing cuts agenda of the main parties.
Millions of working class people feel betrayed by Labour. There’s no fundamental difference anymore between Labour and the Tories. No matter who is in power after the general election, it is certain that workers will face more job losses, privatisation, savage cuts to services and attacks on their living standards.
The coalition aims to bring home the urgent need for “mass resistance to the ruling class offensive and for an alternative programme of left-wing policies to help inspire and direct such resistance”.
The new “Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition” is an important step in the direction of building a new political party that represents the interest of working class people.
A similar initiative is needed in Northern Ireland to give a voice to workers and young people who are opposed to the policies of the political parties in the Assembly. It could be an important first step to the building of a new party of the working class capable of drawing mass support from both Protestant and Catholic communities.
The movement of May 15 in Spain has shaken the political elite to its core. Leaders and candidates of the main capitalist parties, PSOE and the PP are at a loss as to what to say. The media at first patronised the young people who occupied Puerta de Sol last week, labelling them the usual anti-capitalist suspects. Even as late as last Wednesday the Spanish press was in denial about the unfolding situation. Matías Prats, a leading newsreader raised his eyebrows when he read out the headlines on the ’Spanish Revolution’ from the foreign press as if to say, ’what do they know?’ 
New research is claiming that concentrations of carbon dioxide (the main greenhouse gas, CO2) will remain high for at least 1,000 years, even if greenhouse gases are eliminated in the next few decades. The climate scientists who produced this work assert that the effects of global warming, such as high sea levels and reduced rainfall in certain areas, will also persist over this time scale. (The findings are in a paper published in February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers from the USA, Switzerland and France, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0812721106 )
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