As Colombia approaches presidential elections next year, the US decision to decertify the country in the war on drugs plays into the hands of its allies on the political right, writes NICK MacWILLIAM
Lawfare on class warfare: the Tories and the strikes
Since the 1980s the Conservative Party has been trying to win its battles against the unions by changing the rules they are fought on — but you can’t change the material basis of industrial struggle, writes KEITH FLETT
TURNING POINT: Pickets face off with police outside the News International plant in Wapping, 1986
The move against alleged PKK members that sparked outrage as a community centre in north London was raided last year has now come to trial, writes TONY BURKE, but in the meantime, the peace process abroad has changed the situation almost entirely
A new report points a way to overcome complacent framing of climate issues, ‘by sparking a wider public reckoning with climate realities,’ and reconnecting with working-class people. IAN SINCLAIR reports
We cannot understand today’s world without understanding the rise of China – and we cannot understand China without understanding how it was shaped by the second world war, writes JENNY CLEGG
NICK WRIGHT reports from Italy, where 80 cities saw Gaza strikes as unions paralysed transport and massive crowds clashed with police in Milan — but France is also kicking off, and Westminster, in a very different way, is facing a crisis of legitimacy too
Escalating anti-China rhetoric from the West has a clear purpose – to manufacture consent for the new cold war, and potentially a hot one, argues CARLOS MARTINEZ
KARL MARX noted that the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living — and that certainly seems to be the case with current Tory attitudes to industrial action on the cost of living as Rishi Sunak promises yet more anti-union legislation.
The Murdoch-owned Times newspaper, for example, has opined on numerous occasions about trade unions, strikes and what union members must do — primarily stop them and get on with their work.
Yet nowhere in the Times commentaries, or indeed those of Tory ministers and MPs, is recognition of what the Thatcher governments did on trade union law.
More from this author
In 1981, towering figure for the British left Tony Benn came a whisker away from victory, laying the way for a wave of left-wing Labour Party members, MPs and activism — all traces of which are now almost entirely purged by Starmer, writes KEITH FLETT
Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT
KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past
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
