Brazilian workers are calling for internationalist brigades to defend Venezuela from US attack, reports WT WHITNEY JR
Latest editorial
Tyranny of the crowd: how the tables were turned on London’s witch-hunting mobs
JOHN CALLOW tells the story of the innovative but little-known judge, Sir John Holt (1642-1710), and his influential judgements on witch trials
The US reprisal of global nuclear proliferation, threatening a new arms race, could push the world to the brink of annihilation, warns SOPHIE BOLT of CND
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY ask how an 80-tonne whale that lives 200 years is so resistant to cancer
October 2025 was another Black History Month. Has Britain learned anything – or are we going backwards, asks CLAUDIA WEBBE
Real action is needed to make sure tragedies like that at Huntingdon never happen again. TSSA leader MARYAM ESLAMDOUST suggests some practical, achievable steps to be taken
VINCE MILLS sizes up the problems facing Your Party north of the border as it grapples with a range of policies, including its approach to Scottish independence
MARK SERWOTKA issues a rallying call to those committed to building a new radical socialist party of the working class to commit to real democracy, not imaginary or performative gestures
BY THE 1680s, the law lay bleeding in England. City charters had been withdrawn and rewritten, political trials had broken the opposition to the Stuart crown, and a vast standing army was assembled upon Hounslow Heath in order to keep London down.
A new generation of young and highly ambitious lawyers, schooled in the ultra-royalism of the civil wars, had risen to prominence in the service of the restored monarchy and had offered their skills and rapier-like intelligences in the achievement of spectacular political gains through the control of the legislature and the law courts.
Foremost of these was Judge Jeffreys, who rose to become lord chancellor and whose name still resonates with cruelty in the West Country, whose rebels he hanged or transported as slaves to the Americas and the West Indies.
Similar stories
Former judge ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the details and controversy of Lucy Letby’s trial and appeal in the context of famous historical wrongful convictions that prove both the justice system and legal activists make errors
The heroism of the jury who defied prison and starvation conditions secured the absolute right of juries to deliver verdicts based on conscience — a convention which is now under attack, writes MAT COWARD
ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the government’s proposals to further limit the right of citizens to trial by jury
ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the legal case behind this weekend’s Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival and the lessons for today