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
The travesty of liberal Christmas — from Ebenezer Scrooge to Simon Thompson
Despite being possibly the most popular Christmas story after Jesus's birthday, the political logic of A Christmas Carol — that poverty is not justified punishment for indolence — still escapes Britain's bosses, writes KEITH FLETT
A TALE AGAINST THE RICH: Charles Dicken's most famous work in its first edition, 1843
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
CHARLES DICKENS wrote A Christmas Carol at remarkable speed, and it was published on December 19 1843. It had already sold 5,000 copies before Christmas Day that year — in a decade that was known as the Hungry Forties. The similarities with modern “foodbank Britain” are striking.
In Dickens’s book, Ebenezer Scrooge runs a financial business off Cornhill in the heart of the City of London, and the author takes us to his counting house on Christmas Eve.
Scrooge is in one office and across the way is his clerk Bob Cratchit. The office is barely heated, Scrooge being frugal in most things.
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
