The NEU kept children and teachers safe during the pandemic, yet we are disgracefully slandered by the politicians who have truly failed our children by not funding a proper education recovery programme — here’s what is needed, explains KEVIN COURTNEY

APPOINTED the deputy director of strategy and communications in the Labour leadership team in February 2017, Steve Howell had an insider’s view of the most extraordinary general election of recent times.
Cardiff-based Howell was the chief executive of Freshwater, a communications consultancy he founded in 1997, when he got the call from his old friend Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s director for communications and strategy.
“Politics is not a spectator sport,” he recounts Milne telling him in his new book Game Changer: Eight Weeks That Transformed British Politics.

New releases from Steady Habits, Jeff Tweedy, and Tom Skinner

IAN SINCLAIR welcomes a lucid critique of a technology that reproduces and enables oppression, power, and environmental devastation

Reviews of new releases by Wednesday, Suede, and Nation of Language

Reviews of new releases by Jens Lekman, Big Thief, and Christian McBride Big Band