General secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions GAWAIN LITTLE calls for support and participation in the national partnership organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1926 general strike
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Levelling Up?
STEPHEN ARNELL marks 380 years of early social reformers, The Levellers
Levellers day
After brutal police crackdowns on pensioners and the forced approval of secret IMF deals, trade unions are finally responding to grassroots pressure and fighting back against savage neoliberal reforms, reports BERT SCHOUWENBURG
Bizarrely, Trump’s latest attacks now include the National Zoo, but his real and racist agenda is to strip everything black from the country’s cultural institutions, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
The economic value of disability benefits far outweighs their cost, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY
As tensions rise in the Middle East, the role of Iran in the region’s political balance becomes ever more significant. STEVE BISHOP assesses the current situation
“I THINK the poorest has a life to live in England as the greatest. The poorest man in England is not bound to any government he has not had a voice in choosing” — Leveller leader Thomas Rainborough at The Putney Debates (1647).
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first written use of the term for the political movement to 1644, in Marchamont Needham’s pamphlet, The Case for the Commonwealth of England Stated — although this may have been a retrospective conceit as the pamphlet was printed in 1650, but, for our purposes 1644 suits admirably.
Born from the tyrannical rule of Charles I and subsequent tumult of the English civil wars in the 1640s, proto-democratic semi-socialist republicans the Levellers were the first English political movement with a coherent manifesto, much of which anticipated later trade unions and political parties.
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