To claim or not to claim: that is the question

An analysis of when to bring contractual claims in the employment tribunal and how to withdraw such claims in order to pursue them in the civil courts

The Law of Love

The Bible is clear that to love God involves seeking to be obedient to God. Being God’s people involves seeking to make wise decisions about the way in which God wants us to live. Jesus commands his followers to love God and our neighbours. In working out what that means, followers of Jesus need to take into account what God has revealed in the Torah about what it means to love him and to love another, as fulfilled, interpreted and modelled by Jesus. The Holy Spirit is given to us to enable us to grow in love. In order to make wise decisions we need to have internalised God’s law and to meditate on it with the help of the Spirit. In heaven, doing what God wants will be second nature. Till then, reflection on God’s law is an indispensable part of discerning what it means in practice to love God and to love our neighbour

Rocky Relationships

A comment on the relational deficits at the heart of the current banking crisis

Resource virtualisation of network routers

There is now considerable interest in applications that transport time-sensitive data across the best-effort Internet. We present a novel network router architecture, which has the potential to improve the Quality of Service guarantees provided to such flows. This router architecture makes use of virtual machine techniques, to assign an individual virtual routelet to each network flow requiring QoS guarantees. We describe a prototype of this virtual routelet architecture, and evaluate its effectiveness. Experimental results of the performance and flow partitioning of this prototype, compared with a standard software router, suggest promise in the virtual routelet architecture

Hera-JVM: abstracting processor heterogeneity behind a virtual machine

Heterogeneous multi-core processors, such as the Cell processor, can deliver exceptional performance, however, they are notoriously difficult to program effectively. We present Hera-JVM, a runtime system which hides a processor’s heterogeneity behind a homogeneous virtual machine interface. Preliminary results of three benchmarks running under Hera-JVM are presented. These results suggest a set of application behaviour characteristics that the runtime system should take into account when placing threads on different core types.

Strikes and class consciousness in the early work of Richard Hyman

This article reviews the writings of Richard Hyman analysing strikes during the militancy of the 1970s. It focuses on his central concern with the relationship between industrial action and class consciousness, a perennial issue in Marxist theory, setting this discussion in the context of Hyman’s examination of contemporary trade unionism and his membership of a small revolutionary group, the International Socialists. The development of his thinking from economism and rank-and-fileism towards understanding the social gestation of consciousness, and his ultimate conviction that strikes possess no necessary connection with radicalisation and that even in revolutionary situations are subordinate to political action is explored and assessed. The article concludes with consideration of the related literature and reflections on socialists and strikes in contemporary Britain

Radical political unionism reassessed

Defections from European social-democratic parties and a resurgence of union militancy have prompted some to diagnose a new left-wing trade unionism across Europe. This comment on the article by Connolly and Darlington scrutinizes trends in France and Germany but primarily analyses recent developments in Britain. While there are some instances of disaffiliation from the Labour Party, support for electoral alternatives, growth in political militancy and emphasis on new forms of internationalism, these have been limited. There is insufficient evidence to suggest that we are witnessing the making of a new radical collectivism

British Labour and the challenge of Israel-Palestine

Review of: Paul Kelemen The British Left and Zionism: History of a Divorce, Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2012; 225 pp: 978071908813

Another look at E. P. Thompson and British Communism, 1937-1955

Examination of E. P. Thompson’s activism in the Communist Party (CPGB) has been limited. Some historians, basing themselves on his memories and interpretations of his 1955 biography of William Morris, have portrayed him as a dissenter, at best a loyal critic of CPGB policy. Others have deduced political conformity from his fourteen years membership of a declining organisation. This article reappraises the literature and reassesses the making and unmaking of a Communist intellectual. It explores Thompson’s contemporary writings – rarely exposed to critical scrutiny – and employs recently released security files to reconstruct the historian’s ideas and activity across the post-war decade. The article concludes that in these years Thompson remained a faithful supporter of the Soviet Union, the party line and ‘high Stalinism’. Khruschev’s ‘Secret Speech’ and the Russian invasion of Hungary did not validate pre-existing dissent. They were the pivotal factors provoking a rupture with the Stalinism Thompson had championed from 1942 to 1955