ANDREW MURRAY surveys a quaking continent whose leaders have no idea how to respond to an openly contemptuous United States
Madam Thring, the ‘hypnotic’ red rebel rabble rouser for direct action
From swimming pool soviets to piano factory occupations, early 20th-century radical organiser Lillian Thring chose street battles and mass action over the electoral path, writes MAT COWARD
Based on his experience of Haringey Council Councillor MARK BLAKE believes only a radical policy rethink will reconnect councils with the alienated constituencies they are supposed to serve
Last week the CPUSA launched a new Rapid Response project aimed at mobilising a popular resistance to policies enacted by the new government. CAMERON HARRISON explains
WHAT would you do if a mysterious woman with hypnotic eyes told you to occupy a piano factory, a swimming baths or a public library? Well, what could you possibly do, other than obey?
Lillian Harris, born in London in 1887, was a shop assistant and suffragist who moved to Australia in her mid-twenties and there became involved with various revolutionary movements, notably the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”), earning a reputation as a fine public speaker.
She married a man named Thring, and the couple relocated first to Khartoum and then, with their young son, back to London, where Lillian joined Sylvia Pankhurst’s campaign for peace and universal suffrage.
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Despite his wealthy background and membership of a secretive aristocratic occult club, the radical politician forged an alliance with the working class to fight for democracy and free speech against the Georgian elite, writes MAT COWARD
MAT COWARD offers a roll call of refuseniks – some for political reasons, others for quirky reasons of their own
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
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