That should be warning enough to end the company’s contract with the NHS, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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The biggest petition: the Chartists’ demand for the vote, April 1848
Forget Farage and the recent daft demands for a new election against Labour: the greatest petition Britain has ever known gathered millions of names demanding the right to vote — and it didn’t work either, writes KEITH FLETT
The murder of an anti-racist protester in 1979 by a special unit of the Met Police was followed by a gruelling battle to win answers about what happened on that tragic day. Now material related to that campaign is available to the public and researchers for the first time at the Bishopsgate Institute. INDIANNA PURCELL reports
In advance of the Socialism or Barbarism day school on March 29, Arise Festival’s SAM BROWSE writes on why we must oppose the cuts to welfare and the drive to war
While VINCE MILLS laments the resignation of Neil Findlay from Scottish Labour, he explains why he won’t be joining him outside the party in the ongoing struggle for a socialist future
The US Republican administration has wasted no time in tightening the economic vice on the Caribbean island, with State Department officials making it clear that the aggression is only just beginning, writes NATASHA HICKMAN
Any positives from the government’s green paper proposals are vastly overshadowed by the scale of the cuts to vulnerable low-income households, argues JENNY RATHBONE MS
While the council can generate much-needed income with this new charge, making the city sustainable and affordable for its all-important workers needs a wider approach that’s not just focused on tourism, writes IAN MacCORQUODALE
PETITIONING Parliament has been part of the democratic repertoire of contention for many centuries. Some issues might seem unusual in 2024. A recent study has found that 30 per cent of petitions to the House of Commons between 1833 and 1918 were about drink and temperance.
Petitioning has been in the news again because of an online call promoted by Elon Musk and Nigel Farage for a new British general election to be held. It has gathered several million signatures, albeit from 183 countries. It falls very much into a favourite campaigning area of the hard right — that of manufactured outrage.
Moreover, it is certainly nowhere near the largest-ever petition in Britain. In recent times, several around Brexit have been larger. However, we need to look back to the Chartists for a petition that remains the largest in British history.
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Modern Christmas as we know it, with its trees, dinner menu, cards and time off from work, only dates back to the early days of modern socialism as we know it, writes KEITH FLETT, checking in on Marx, Engels and the Chartists in the 1800s
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