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

IN 2012, Dominic Raab co-authored a fanatically right-wing book entitled Britannia Unchained — a blueprint for Thatcherism on steroids that accused British workers of being “among the worst idlers in the world” and argued that “too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work.”
Yet last week, during the foreign affairs committee evidence session on Britain’s catastrophic handling of the Kabul evacuation, Raab was forced to defend his decision to stay on holiday while hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people in Afghanistan required his assistance.
In the end, he admitted that he should have left the beach earlier.

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

