Decommissioned railway tracks have been ‘repossessed’ by nature with wild birds the prominent protagonists, writes MARK SEDDON
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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
ROGER MCKENZIE recalls the one-in-a-generation communist leader murdered at the dawn of a new South Africa 33 years ago last April 10
Ignorance of working-class history leaves working people open to deceptive narratives, demagogy and political manipulation, writes SAN SENIK
Delegates rejected calls to disaffiliate after a passionate three-hour debate, while warning the Labour leadership that working-class members demand change
TUC Cymru’s programme offers a potential roadmap for co-operation between Labour and Plaid Cymru on jobs, services and economic democracy, says DAI MORGAN
HAZEL PRING and MAX DICKINSON introduce The Angry Summer Project, a fringe for the TUC Cymru Congress
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 City charters had been withdrawn and rewritten, political trials had broken the opposition to the Stuart crown, and a vast standing army was assembled upon Hounslow Heath in order to keep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.
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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
From Gaza protest bans to proscribing Palestine Action, political elites are showing a crisis of confidence as they abandon Roy Jenkins’s apologetic approach for Suella Braverman’s aggressive ‘hate march’ rhetoric, writes PAUL DONOVAN
ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the legal case behind this weekend’s Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival and the lessons for today