From the 1917 Balfour Declaration to today’s F-35 sales, Britain’s historical responsibility has now evolved into support for the present-day outright genocide. But our solidarity movement is growing too, writes BEN JAMAL
Latest editorial
The case of the West End Riots
MAT COWARD remembers when the Conservative HQ at the Carlton Club got engulfed in some street-based class warfare
End of the meeting in Trafalgar Square (illustration from the Illustrated London News)
DIANE ABBOTT MP warns Starmer’s newly declared war on foreigners and scroungers won’t fix housing or services — only class struggle against austerity can do that, and defeat Farage in the process
Ben Chacko talks to ALAN MARDGHUM of the Durham Miners Association about Reform UK‘s dangerous inroads into Durham’s long-standing Labour county council; why he cancelled his party membership; and the political class’s disconnect from working people
Speaking to a CND meeting in Cambridge this week, SIMON BRIGNELL traced how the alliance’s anti-communist machinery broke unions, diverted vital funds from public services, and turned workers into cannon fodder for profit
We’ll be developing a people’s manifesto for the 2026 local elections. We’ll network, learn, inspire and support each other and chart a future path for socialist politics, writes JAMIE DRISCOLL
MAT COWARD rises over such semantics to offer step by step, fool-proof cultivating tips
MOLLY QUELL reports on the sanctions placed on International Criminal Court officials by the Trump regime, making it increasingly difficult for the tribunal to conduct even basic tasks
THERE are some riots you just can’t help chuckling at, even if you’re not the sort of person usually given to inappropriate levity. The circumstances which led to the stoning of the Carlton Club, on February 8 1886, would surely be enough to make even the soberest cadre crack a tiny smile.
It began with a pressure group affiliated to the Conservative Party, called the Fair-Trade League, holding a rally in Trafalgar Square to demand “Free Trade within the Empire and Protection against the World.”
Interpreting this as an attempt to win working-class support for conservatism, the Social Democratic Federation, Britain’s earliest self-styled Marxist party, called its own demonstration — same time, same place. It argued that the unemployment then blighting the nation was caused by capitalism, not by beastly foreigners, and could be ameliorated by government support for new co-operative businesses.
Similar stories
Edinburgh can take great pride in an episode of its history where a murderous captain of the city guard was brought to justice by a righteous crowd — and nobody snitched to Westminster in the aftermath, writes MAT COWARD
MAT COWARD tells of a pioneering suffragette and one of the first direct actionists, who’s commemorated in a street name in Swindon
From swimming pool soviets to piano factory occupations, early 20th-century radical organiser Lillian Thring chose street battles and mass action over the electoral path, writes MAT COWARD
MAT COWARD explores how the ‘Tory-Radical’ Christian minister became a fiery opponent of the Poor Law, advocating armed resistance against its brutal cruelty against the emerging working class