JOE BESWICK of the London Renters Union talks to the Morning Star’s new Left on Record programme
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Levelling Up?
STEPHEN ARNELL marks 380 years of early social reformers, The Levellers
Levellers day
The unnecessarily violent police intervention at a Quaker place of worship is a PR disaster and will only serve to deepen the chasm between them and the public. SYMON HILL reports
ANDREW MURRAY wonders whether recent opinion polling and a fresh local authority by-election result in Ilford are an indication that the time is ripe for the left to make inroads
Due to the actions of this government, the challenges facing those with disabilities, such as spinal cord injuries, are nigh on insurmountable, argus RUTH HUNT
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
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
“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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