Zarah Sultana’s recent brave criticisms of Labour from 2015 to 2020, including Brexit triangulation, IHRA capitulation and insufficient fighting spirit, have ruffled feathers but started an essential discussion, writes ANDREW MURRAY

YOU know you are in a dangerous international crisis when almost the entire British media and every parliamentary party embarks on a grotesque auction in bellicose rhetoric.
Among the cliches bandied about are “appeasement” and the “new Hitler.” How many of those have we had now? Why always a Hitler, by the way? Why never a Franco or a Pinochet or a Shah of Iran or a Suharto, or...? Perhaps we ought not enquire too deeply.
And the more the public become aware of a rational approach that can prevent war, the greater the drumbeats to drown out such dangerous thinking.

A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN

As Starmer flies to Albania seeking deportation camps while praising Giorgia Meloni, KEVIN OVENDEN warns that without massive campaigns rejecting this new overt government xenophobia, Britain faces a soaring hard right and emboldened fascist thugs on the streets

