From Chartists and Suffragettes to Irish republicans and today’s Palestine activists, the treatment of hunger strikers exposes a consistent pattern in how the British state represses those it deems political prisoners, says KEITH FLETT
The mirage of social democracy’s ‘resurgence’
A number of recent European election results show not a return to the centre, but a gathering of an increasing number of fragments out of which to construct governments, writes KEVIN OVENDEN
THE Norwegian and German general elections last September — the Portuguese last month.
Each, especially the last with the surprise majority for the centre-left prime minister Antonio Costa, has been taken as evidence of a revival of the European social democratic parties after nearly three decades of apparently inexorable decline.
Norway and Germany have social democratic-led governments replacing previous coalitions dominated by the centre right.
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