NICK TROY lauds the young staff at a hotel chain and cinema giant who are ready to take on the bosses for their rights
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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
DYLAN MURPHY reports that far from helping people back into work, the sanctions regime is inflicting unnecessary trauma on working-class families
As Saudi Arabia is hailed abroad for its ‘reforms,’ the reality for women inside the kingdom grows ever more repressive. On the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, MARYAM ALDOSSARI argues it is time to stop applauding the illusion – and start listening to the women the state works hardest to silence
With Petro, Colombia has been making huge strides towards peace — but is all that at risk with the elections next year? MARK ROWE reports back after joining a delegation to the Latin American country
With violence against women and girls reaching unprecedented levels – particularly in the north of England – Unison North West is driving a union-wide push for education, prevention and trauma-informed support, writes JOANNE MOORCROFT
Amid national economic decay and with a lack of coherent left-wing responses, far-right narratives on women’s safety and immigration have taken root in former Labour heartlands. The WOMEN’S LIBERATION ALLIANCE warns that only a renewed politics rooted in an understanding of class, race and sex can stem the rise of authoritarianism
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.
Similar stories
Charles Dickens was facing a return to the destitution that had blighted his childhood, and it was this which drove him to write the remarkable best-seller which changed the politics of Christmas forever, writes MAT COWARD
Modern Christmas as we know it, with its trees, dinner menu, cards and time off from work, only dates back to the early days of modern socialism as we know it, writes KEITH FLETT, checking in on Marx, Engels and the Chartists in the 1800s
From Raab to Rees-Mogg, STEPHEN ARNELL observes how modern Conservatives yearn for the return of the brutal institutions where the poor were imprisoned and punished for their plight
DAVID NICHOLSON, eight-year-old BEHATI and nine-year-old SKYLAR applaud a hilarious production that doesn’t ignore the social message