The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Introducing skirret – a long-forgotten vegetable
Despite being tasty and nutritious, this root veg did not fit into the capitalist mould, so never won the popularity of the more durable potato, writes MAT COWARD
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
RMT leader Eddie Dempsey's stark warning shook up a fringe meeting at the Scottish TUC
Incredibly, US Republican states are systematically dismantling child labour protections, with children transformed back into the cheap, disposable workers of the Dickens era, reports ANDREW MURRAY
KYRIL WHITTAKER looks at what guides Vietnam 50 years after reunification
IT TASTES good, it’s nutritious, it’s easy to grow and you can harvest it more or less all year round. So why isn’t skirret better known?
The answer, I suspect, lies in the transition from one mode of production to another: skirret (Sium sisarum) is a vegetable well suited to gardeners growing for their own use. But it doesn’t lend itself to capitalist agriculture, which requires, amongst other factors, uniformity of product and a decent shelf-life. Skirret doesn’t keep well, doesn’t travel well, is of unpredictable size, shape and quality, and it’s fiddly to clean before cooking.
The potato, on the other hand, fitted into the industrial revolution like a jigsaw piece, meeting the needs of busy, hungry, dispossessed proletarians and of the landowners. Potatoes are easy to market and to use. As a result, many of our traditionally popular root crops disappeared, at least until the allotment movement.
More from this author
Edinburgh can take great pride in an episode of its history where a murderous captain of the city guard was brought to justice by a righteous crowd — and nobody snitched to Westminster in the aftermath, writes MAT COWARD
Well, MAT COWARD did, and here’s his introduction to it
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