This year’s Bristol Radical History Festival focused on the persistent threats of racism, xenophobia and, of course, our radical collective resistance to it across Ireland and Britain, reports LYNNE WALSH

LAST week every single Conservative MP voted in favour of a piece of legislation that would not look out of place within the world’s most authoritarian regimes.
Significant concerns have been raised by human-rights groups, lawyers and activists that the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Bill constitutes a significant reduction in established freedom to protest. The Bill includes measures to “strengthen police powers to tackle non-violent protests that have a significant disruptive effect on the public or on access to Parliament.”
The Metropolitan Police’s awful mismanagement of Saturday’s peaceful vigil in memory of Sarah Everard should remind the government that the police do not need any more powers to suppress our democratic rights of free assembly and peaceful protest. If anything, now is the time for the rights of protesters to be broadened and strengthened.

With Reform UK surging and Labour determined not to offer anything different from the status quo, a clear opportunity opens for the left, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE

Keir Starmer’s £120 million to Sudan cannot cover the government’s complicity in the RSF genocide or atone for the long shadow of British colonialism and imperialism, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE

