Britons are living in fear of deepening poverty as a result of the government’s attack on the benefits system, a new poll reveals today (Monday 11 February).

Growing poverty and inequality in Europe prove that the market alone cannot deliver. It’s time to change the narrative, says JUDITH KIRTON-DARLING, Confederal Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). Here, she sets out the terms of a new European social contract.

Austerity and poverty in Europe are blighting our continent. Both are having dramatic impacts on solidarity, our democracies and our capacity to create the conditions for peace and prosperity in Europe.

On the 16 August, South African Police fired live ammunition at striking miners at Lonmin’s Marikana mine, killing 34 and injuring 78. Many were shot at close range while trying to surrender. The Marikana miners were demanding a tripling of their salary to R12,500 (£950 or €1100) per month.

In the following days, 270 of the Marikana strikers were arrested and charged with the murder of their colleagues under the Common Purpose doctrine, a law last used under Apartheid.

The self-declared ‘plebs’ were out in force on Saturday at the TUC’s march against austerity in London, while thousands more were on the streets of Glasgow and Belfast to voice their anger at the coalition government.

‘Plebs Unite’ read one placard. ‘Proud Loud Educated Broke’ said another. ‘I’d rather be a pleb than a toff’ was one of the many intermittent cries as somewhere around 150,000 people walked the familiar route from Victoria Embankment via Whitehall and Trafalgar Square to the bark-chip strewn mud-patch that used to be Hyde Park.

The TUC is calling for people from across the country to join its national demonstration against the coalition government’s cuts and austerity programme in London on Saturday 20 October.

The march, called ‘A Future that Works’, will follow the same route as last year’s March for the Alternative which attracted a quarter of a million people. The TUC are hoping for a similar turn-out this year when Labour leader Ed Miliband is expected to join the demonstration.

DAVID HOPPER, General Secretary of the Durham Miners’ Association, looks back at the remarkable life of Robert ‘Bob’ Smillie as he reviews a new book on the Labour movement pioneer.

As a 20-year-old member of the Independent Labour party, Hetty Bower from Hackney in East London supported the General Strike, which lasted from 4-13 May 1926. She is now 106 years old, but remembers it vividly.

The ILP, which returned to the Labour Party in 1975 as Independent Labour Publications, was in many respects a shadow of its former self. But what it lacked in size and organisations it intended to make up for with political clarity, intellectual honesty and a determination to learn from the left’s past failures, including its own.

The Working Class Movement Library, which houses some of the ILP archives, has won the national Museums at Night contest to stage an international artist event in May.

The Salford-based library beat Quay Arts on the Isle of Wight and the Guernsey Museum in a public vote described as ‘a triumph of activism’ by its manager Lynette Cawthra. The library won the right to host internationally-acclaimed landscape and documentary photographer Simon Roberts.

John Lowe recorded everything that happened to him and his Nottinghamshire NUM comrades during the 1984-5 miners’ strike. His grandson, JONATHAN SYMCOX, who edited the newly published diary, recalls a man transformed by the dispute.

John Lowe of Clipstone in Nottinghamshire was off sick in spring 1984 when the National Coal Board and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government put into motion their long-prepared pit closure programme. The miners’ strike for jobs erupted almost overnight.