Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

New figures from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, which co-ordinates applications for tertiary education in Britain, reveal that the number of British-born university applicants for the academic year starting next September, when the Conservative-led coalition’s decision to raise tuition fees to up to £9,000 a year kick in, has plummeted by 12 per cent. [...]

Benefit staff could soon be queuing on the other side of the counter to claim the dole as the Government decides to close another 19 jobcentres and moves to make 350 staff compulsorily redundant. The announcement by the Department of Work and Pensions – not featured in a press release – was slipped out last [...]

Britain’s gross domestic product rose by 0.5 per cent in the third quarter of this year – a bit better than the expected 0.3 per cent. But despite some initial optimistic news reports that the results were “better than expected”, closer examination revealed the full extent of the difficulties facing the British economy. The third [...]

Up to one in five people in Britain will be affected by the Government’s raid on public sector pensions, according to Unite. The union, Britain’s largest, said 12 million of the country’s 62 million people either draw a pension after working in public services, are actively paying into schemes, or have moved to the private [...]

In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, an Islamist party has won the largest share of votes in the first elections held after the overthrow of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who ruled the country for 23 years. Fears have been expressed, particularly that women will have to wear the veil, because while in public [...]

Public spending on education in Britain will fall by more than 13 per cent in real terms  – the largest cuts since the post-war, austerity-ridden 1950s – by the end of this Parliament, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The biggest losers will be not just early years schoolchildren but also 16-19-year old university [...]

Rail unions have hit out at Tory plans to run driverless trains on the Tube in London – describing them as a “blueprint for jobs and safety carnage”. Secret documents prepared for Transport for London propose to run automatic trains with low-paid “attendants” instead of drivers and to make passengers pay for their journeys using [...]

The vast majority of GPs – seven out of 10 – believe the Government’s NHS changes will put them in an impossible “conflict of interest” position forced to choose between doctor-patient relationships and hard-headed commercial decisions, according to a major survey of every general practitioner in Britain by their union, the British Medical Association. The [...]

As thousands of public sector workers this week started voting on strikes – and ministers appeared to stymie any chance of imminent agreement on pension reform – the prospect of a dramatic, and unpredictable, showdown with the Government from next month seems inevitable. Within the next couple of weeks the results of ballots by high-ranking [...]

Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, has admitted that the decision to pump more money into the British economy does not – and cannot – guarantee an increase in lending by commercial banks in this country. His frank admission, which was pounced on by critics of the policy as embarrassing, was made [...]