The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Sebastian, Four Mothers, Restless, and The Most Precious of Cargoes
Latest editorial
Hope lies with the grassroots
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds a timely reminder of a past victory, and its clear message that leadership is not to be found among the Labour right
books
JOHN GREEN explores the argument that psychiatry needs to move away from the idea of just seeing and treating the individual
SYLVIA HIKINS applauds a polemic against “cleanfluencers” and considers radical alternatives to current inequalities of housework
RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: A Short History of the Anti-Poll Tax Struggle 1987–1993
Chris Robinson, Thinkwell Books, £10
A LESSON for the Labour leadership lurks at the moral core of this timely history of the poll tax and the juggernaut of rebellion against it by working people.
Chris Robinson’s book reminds today’s leaders — and the wider labour movement — that the unjust, cynical “community charge” as it was euphemistically called was defeated on the streets, in parlours and in pubs, and not in Parliament.
The abject failure of the then Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, and his party’s cowardly siege of its own left wing in the miserably deluded hope that this would reward them at the ballot box comes across on every page.
More from this author
GAVIN O’TOOLE explores the resistance expressed by central American artists to their own erasure by US imperialist policies
Here’s an antidote to the Venezuela election-induced tantrums of Western elites. GAVIN O’TOOLE reviews it
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds an analysis of culture that explains why political conflicts today are focused more on values and identity than the economy and social questions
GAVIN O’TOOLE observes that the call for a new international framework for conflict mediation is fatally marred by a partisan position on the Isreali-Gazan conflict