From London’s holly-sellers to Engels’s flaming Christmas centrepiece, the plum pudding was more than festive fare in Victorian Britain, says KEITH FLETT
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Ken Loach: ‘The left is always on the map’
Morning Star editor Ben Chacko speaks to one of Britain’s greatest living directors — and one of the biggest names to be expelled from Labour in the recent purges — about what the socialist left does next in the Starmer era
Ken Loach, November 2019
Once the bustling heart of Christian pilgrimage, Bethlehem now faces shuttered hotels, empty streets and a shrinking Christian community, while Israel’s assault on Gaza and the tightening grip of occupation destroy hopes of peace at the birthplace of Christ, writes Father GEOFF BOTTOMS
From a lockdown digital project to a vital tool for class solidarity, ROBERT POOLE and HENRY FOWLER reflect on half-a-decade of struggle
After years hidden away, Oldham’s memorial to six local volunteers who died fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war has been restored to public view, marking both a victory for campaigners and a renewed tribute to the town’s proud International Brigade heritage, says ROB HARGREAVES
The June 2025 attacks on Iran have heightened the risk of a wider war, exposed the fiction of a rules-based international order and left ordinary Iranians trapped between external aggression and internal repression, says the Committee for Defence of Iranian People’s Rights
While pretending to seek peace, Europe is heading toward a collision course with Russia – using security guarantees, troop deployments, expropriation and censorship as tools, writes SEVIM DAGDELEN
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
IT’S an election year. From its earliest days the Tories, Labour and SNP have been in salesperson mode, making pitches to the electorate.
But the last months of 2023 have, through the eruption of a huge street movement for peace and an exodus of councillors from a Labour Party that backs Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, thrown up new questions about that election.
Have they put the left back on the map, I ask film director Ken Loach — who since his expulsion from Starmer’s Labour (for the very Starmerist offence of failing to condemn other people who had been expelled) has helped set up the For the Many network to maintain a socialist voice in politics.
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