Seventeen years after losing her council job due to needing endometriosis surgery, Michelle Dewar’s campaign for paid menstrual leave gained 50,000 signatures in a week, reports ELIZABETH SHORT
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An eloquent lesson in classroom resistance
JOHN GREEN remembers the moment when Stepney Words, a book of poetry by working-class schoolchildren, rocked the East End of London
FIGHTING FOR THEIR RIGHTS: Pupils of the Sir John Cass Foundation and Red Coat Church of England Secondary School demand the reinstatement of Christopher Searle
From 35,000 troops in Talisman Sabre war games to HMS Spey provocations in the Taiwan Strait, Labour continues Tory militarisation — all while claiming to uphold ‘one China’ diplomatic agreements from 1972, reports KENNY COYLE
White racist rioting has many an infamous precedent in Britain, writes DAVID HORSLEY
The SNP might dissemble over the meaning of ‘nationalism,’ but it can’t disguise the fact that it is no left-wing party, says ELAINE SMITH
Castro became one of the first leaders to denounce Israeli genocide against Palestinians at the UN, comparing zionist persecution to Nazi crimes while Cuba trained PLO cadres and awarded Arafat state honours, writes PABLO MERIGUET
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
THIS month marks 50 years since Chris Searle, a young English teacher at the Sir John Cass school in London’s East End, hit the headlines after being sacked for encouraging his pupils to write poetry about their own lives and neighbourhoods.
The school’s pupils came from a variety of cultural backgrounds, black and white, virtually all working class and very often poor. From the word go, these children had been treated as incapable of going far in life, as barely educable and told repeatedly that they were thick, so any hopes or ambitions they might have had for their lives was stymied before they had a chance.
Searle refused to accept this view, knew that these children had more to offer and could be enormously creative if they were given the chance.
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