MBDA’s Alabama factory makes components for Boeing’s GBU-39 bombs used to kill civilians in Gaza. Its profits flow through Stevenage to Paris — and it is one of the British government’s favourite firms, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
Labour and the ‘broad church’ projects
Organising inside or outside the Labour Party? The question is not a new one, observes KEITH FLETT
Right-wing Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, and leftwingers Tony Benn and Laura Pidcock
President Maduro mobilises the 4.5 million-strong Bolivarian National Militia in response to US ‘threats’, vowing to defend the country’s sovereignty and independence, DEVIN B MARTINEZ reports
Washington plays innocent bystander while pouring weapons and intelligence into Ukraine, just as it enables the Gaza genocide — but every US escalation leaves Ukraine weaker than the neutrality deal rejected in 2022, argue MEDEA BENJAMIN and NICOLAS JS DAVIES
For those in the West, hunger is often just the familiar feeling of a growling stomach between meals — in Gaza, it has become a strategic weapon of slow, systematic and deadly destruction, writes MARC VANDEPITTE
After almost two decades of rule by the Movement Toward Socialism, once led by Evo Morales, right-wing parties have emerged in the lead after the first round of elections on August 17 and are now in control of the legislature, reports PABLO MERIGUET
DAVID MATTHEWS looks at what a collective future for welfare might have in store for us
THE late Ralph Miliband wrote one of the best books about the history of the Labour Party, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour (Allen & Unwin, 1961). Albeit of course it doesn’t cover the last 60 years.
Miliband, the father of David and Ed, opens the book by making the statement that, as a democratic socialist party, Labour had always been among the most dogmatic — not about socialism but about the use of parliamentary as opposed to extra-parliamentary forms of struggle.
His view at that time was that Labour under Hugh Gaitskell was not a vehicle for socialist advance and the leadership of the rather more “left-wing” Harold Wilson did nothing to change his mind.
More from this author
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
KEITH FLETT looks at the long history of coercion in British employment laws
The government cracking down on something it can’t comprehend and doesn’t want to engage with is a repeating pattern of history, says KEITH FLETT
While Hardie, MacDonald and Wilson faced down war pressure from their own Establishment, today’s leadership appears to have forgotten that opposing imperial adventures has historically defined Labour’s moral authority, writes KEITH FLETT
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Starmer’s slash-and-burn approach to disability benefits represents a fundamental break with Labour’s founding mission to challenge the idle rich rather than punish the vulnerable poor, argues KEITH FLETT
Every few years, it seems like the ‘right time’ to build a new left party — but what are the right conditions, asks socialist historian KEITH FLETT, looking back at the last two centuries and the insights of Ralph Miliband and EP Thompson
KEITH FLETT reflects on the 1964 and 1974 election victories, arguing that despite years in power, Labour failed to fundamentally reshape society in the way Thatcher later would — a pattern Blair and now Starmer would follow
The words composed by Sidney Webb: ‘To organise and maintain in Parliament and in the country a Political Labour Party’ were a crucial landmark in Labour’s journey to becoming a membership-based electoral presence, writes KEITH FLETT