While French President Emmanuel Macron continues his months-long battle to raise workers’ retirement age from 62 to 64, his government is waging war on another front, some 8,000 kilometres away on the island of Mayotte.
Standing behind a podium reading “STOP THE BOATS”, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in March launched the Conservative government’s latest piece of anti-refugee legislation. Speaking of his concern for the world’s most vulnerable people—and the country’s allegedly broken border control system, which allows criminal gangs free entry—he said that the only fix is the Illegal Migration Bill, which has now passed the House of Commons.
After the pomp and pageantry of the coronation, we should remember James Connolly’s invocations against “all these parading royalties, all this insolent aristocracy, all these grovelling, dirt-eating capitalist traitors”.
The class struggle in Britain is undergoing a momentous transformation. After decades of low strike rates and declining union membership, workers are now engaged in serious and wide-ranging confrontations with bosses.
Now entering its third month, the French workers’ movement against the government’s pension changes continues to gather steam. On 25 March, 2 million workers around the country took part in the tenth national day of protest called by the coalition of trade unions leading the fight.
If you google “Andrew Tate”, you will discover that he is one of the most googled individuals in the world, and thus the cycle continues. Tate is a far-right misogynist megalomaniac who currently sits in a Romanian jail, suspected of human trafficking, while his fans cry out that their “Top G” has been framed: another victim of the Matrix. The Tate phenomenon is horrifying., a morbid symptom of a sick system.