From London’s holly-sellers to Engels’s flaming Christmas centrepiece, the plum pudding was more than festive fare in Victorian Britain, says KEITH FLETT
'Every weapons delivery is a licence to kill' - an interview with Egon Krenz
Ben Chacko speaks to East Germany's last leader about a world dividing again into armed camps
Egon Krenz at the UZ Pressfest last weekend
Once the bustling heart of Christian pilgrimage, Bethlehem now faces shuttered hotels, empty streets and a shrinking Christian community, while Israel’s assault on Gaza and the tightening grip of occupation destroy hopes of peace at the birthplace of Christ, writes Father GEOFF BOTTOMS
From a lockdown digital project to a vital tool for class solidarity, ROBERT POOLE and HENRY FOWLER reflect on half-a-decade of struggle
After years hidden away, Oldham’s memorial to six local volunteers who died fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war has been restored to public view, marking both a victory for campaigners and a renewed tribute to the town’s proud International Brigade heritage, says ROB HARGREAVES
The June 2025 attacks on Iran have heightened the risk of a wider war, exposed the fiction of a rules-based international order and left ordinary Iranians trapped between external aggression and internal repression, says the Committee for Defence of Iranian People’s Rights
While pretending to seek peace, Europe is heading toward a collision course with Russia – using security guarantees, troop deployments, expropriation and censorship as tools, writes SEVIM DAGDELEN
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
THE death of Mikhail Gorbachev this week brought discussion of the collapse of Soviet socialism back to the fore — especially as the neoliberal world order it ushered in is crumbling around us.
Just a couple of days before the last leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s death I was sat with the last leader of East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), Egon Krenz, a speaker at one of the multiple political talks and rallies that with music, food and drink make up the Unsere Zeit press festival.
Krenz led the German Democratic Republic for a mere six weeks in late 1989 and, unlike Gorbachev, can take neither blame nor credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall: “It was too late for me to do anything.”
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In the first half of a two-part article, PETER MERTENS looks at how Nato’s €800 billion ‘Readiness 2030’ plan serves Washington’s pivot to the Pacific, forcing Europeans to dismantle social security and slash pensions to fund it
As Moscow celebrates the 80th anniversary of the Nazi defeat without Western allies in attendance, the EU even sanctions nations choosing to attend, revealing how completely the USSR's sacrifice of 27 million lives has been erased, argues KATE CLARK
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NICK WRIGHT examines the British ruling class's complex relationship with fascism before, during and after the second world war