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

ONE of the many benefits of the Black Lives Matter movement is that it has forced an increased reckoning with the corrosive legacy of colonialism. This is especially important in Britain, as the brutal history of the British empire casts a long and enduring shadow on present-day global dynamics.
We cannot talk about the present without former empires engaging in a process of recognition, apologies, returning what was stolen and reparations for past atrocities.
By 1921, the British empire ruled a population of between 470 and 570 million people, approximately one-quarter of the world’s people. It covered about 14.3 million square miles, about a quarter of Earth’s total land area.

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

