The US-Israeli strikes against Iran are part of a decades-long war against the Islamic Republic which has refused to bow to US demands that it surrender its sovereignty, argues VIJAY PRASHAD
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Charlie Hutchison, an anti-fascist icon
DAVID HORSLEY honours the black British communist who fought the fascists from Cable Street, to Spain, to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany
LIFELONG COMMUNIST: Charlie Hutchison during World War II
Scotland’s deepening crises expose the human cost of political complacency — and the toll it is taking on working-class communities, says NEIL FINDLAY
History shows from Iraq to Libya, and now Iran, that regime-change fantasies rarely deliver stability — but they always deliver human and economic cost, says MARYAM ESLAMDOUST
Hundreds protested against the US-Israel attacks on Iran in Parliament Square on Saturday, fearing a wider conflagration and horrified by the targeting of young schoolchildren, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
More than a century-and-a-half after its first publication, the message of the first Communist Manifesto continues to resonate throughout the world, says the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
LUKE FLETCHER outlines Plaid Cymru bold plans for wide-ranging policy consultations with trade unions in Wales
IN April 1945, British troops liberated the Belsen concentration camp. What they witnessed there stayed with them for life. They saw 60,000 survivors of the Nazi death camp, all seriously ill and starving, and 13,000 unburied corpses laying on the ground.
One of those troops was a 27-year-old black soldier from Oxfordshire, Charlie Hutchison. What was unique about him was that the sight of the horrifying death camp he saw in Belsen was the culmination of nine years he had been physically fighting that evil ideology: from Cable Street in 1936 to that day in 1945, Hutchison had dedicated his life to the struggle against racism and fascism.
Born on May 10 1918 in Oxfordshire, his mother was a local woman and his father came from the Gold Coast, now Ghana. The latter spent much time travelling back to Africa, and after one journey, did not return, which left Hutchison’s mother in financial hardship as well as mental anguish.
Under duress, she arranged for him and his sister to be taken temporarily into the care of the National Children’s Home and Orphanage in Harpenden. Unfortunately for the mother and children, this temporary stay went on for years, with her unable to take the two back into her care.
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