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
Striking to win the dispute or defeat the government?
KEITH FLETT looks at the long-running quandary faced by strike movements like the one gripping Britain today: do we aim for influence over the ruling party — to drive it from power — or both?
Students shout slogans during a protest in Lyon, central France, March 9 2023, during massive nationwide protests against the government's push to raise the retirement age.
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
WHEN the Radio 4 news at 7pm on March 15 could report first on Jeremy Hunt’s Spring Statement, and then secondly note that it had almost been overshadowed by strikes on the day, it’s clear something significant is moving — at least potentially.
The strikes involved a range of unions — Prospect and PCS in government employers across Britain, NEU teachers in England, Aslef and RMT on London Underground, BMA junior doctors in England, and UCU university workers across the UK.
There was an impressive central London march and rally. I attended one called by the Wales TUC in central Cardiff. At the Cardiff rally, there were of course veterans of many previous fights, but there were also numbers of younger trade unionists. Indeed, such was the scale of the action that many on strike would have been doing so for the first time.
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
