HENRY FOWLER, co-founder of Strike Map, announces a new collaboration with UnionMaps, integrating two important sets of data that will facilitate the labour movement in its analysis, planning and action
Remembering John Smith
The late John Smith, pictured in 1993
RICHARD BURGON MP reports that Cuba’s world-renowned medical programmes that support not only its citizens but countries worldwide are under strain from the US blockade, but the British labour movement can and must help
It’s hard to understand how minor divisions can come to dominate the process of building a challenge to the rule of the rich when the desperate need for a vehicle to fight poverty and despair is so abundantly clear, writes MATT KERR
Two-hundred years ago, on September 27 1825, the world’s first passenger railway line was opened between Stockton and Darlington. MICK WHELAN, general secretary of Aslef, the train drivers’ union, reflects on the history – and the future – of Britain’s railway industry
In Washington, the willingness to accept an open war with Russia is growing — at Europe’s expense. While Nato states are being drawn into confrontation, Europe risks becoming the battlefield of a potential world war, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN
GEOFF BOTTOMS charts the history of the Stockton & Darlington Railway 200 years ago, which served as a blueprint for the modern network and opened up a new era of working-class travel
ON SUNDAY many will be remembering the late Labour leader John Smith, 25 years on from his death. In a counterfactual history (as part of The Prime Ministers Who Never Were, Biteback, 2011), the writer and journalist Francis Beckett imagined if he had instead recovered from his heart attack.
In this fantasy, “Smith was happy, after September 11 2001, to send British troops to Afghanistan, but he drew the line at committing himself to war in Iraq, and made common cause with the French.”
Tony Blair never rose further than education secretary — and Gordon Brown’s hopes were thwarted by his “old nemesis Ken Livingstone, to whose 10-year occupancy of No 10 we owe, among much else, our pedestrianised city centres.”
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CONRAD LANDIN offers a guide to the diverse shows at Edinburgh Art Festival
