Solidarity 390, 20 January 2016

London Underground workers in the RMT, TSSA, and Aslef unions will strike for 24 hours, starting on the evening of 26 January.

On 19 January, the British Medical Association (BMA), acting for junior doctors, suspended a strike planned for 26 January, as the government reopened negotiations on the new contracts. The first strike by junior doctors on 12 January was supported by other trade unionists and the general public.

Sixty years ago, the Socialist Party ran its last presidential campaign in the United States.

In its heyday, the party could capture upwards of a million votes, achieving this result in 1912, 1920 and again in 1932. The best result was the first one, when Eugene V. Debs led the party to six per cent of the national vote. But less than a quarter century after Norman Thomas won nearly 900,000 votes at the height of the Great Depression, the total number of votes the Socialist could muster nationwide was a mere 2,044.

In a scene fairly early on in the The Big Short two financial traders visit a Florida housing estate where, they’ve discovered, most of the homeowners are well behind with mortgage repayments.

Homoeopathic medicines do nothing that a placebo does not do. This is because they contain no active ingredient... like a placebo. But the NHS spends our money on them.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, who has died aged 73, was a noted intellectual figure on the international left who influenced several generations of thinkers and activists.

Born in New York as Ellen Meiksins one year after her parents, Latvian Jews active in the Bund, arrived as political refugees, Wood studied in California before establishing herself as an academic in Canada, based at York University in Toronto.

Her writings were thought-provoking and luminous.

David Cameron wants to cut access to benefits for workers coming from the European Union to the UK. The campaigners for British exit from the EU, the Tory right and UKIP, would like to stop those benefits altogether. David Cameron wants to cut back some of the worker protections which have come into the UK from processes of “levelling-up” across the EU, like the Working Time Directive, the Agency Workers’ Directive, and TUPE, (the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) regulations. The EU-exit campaigners would like to abolish those protections altogether.

Once again outrage has been sparked by a cartoon in a special issue of French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo.

The Daily Mail has condemned the National Union of Students over its links with the organisation Cage (formerly Cageprisoners), run by former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg.