TUC president and POA leader STEVE GILLAN speaks to Ben Chacko on the eve of Congress 2026
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Marx, Engels and the English Easter break
From bemoaning London’s ‘cockneys’ invading seaside towns to negotiating holiday rents, the founders of scientific socialism maintained a wry detachment from Victorian Easter customs while using the break for health and politics, writes KEITH FLETT
DOUG NICHOLLS welcomes a turning point at this year’s Congress, where many motions call for a co-ordinated plan to revive British industry, a perspective outlined in his new book
HOPE VIRGO of campaign Dump the Scales warns MPs voting today they should be alert to the threat legalised assisted death poses to people with eating disorders
The Together Alliance is hosting two summits, North and South, to build power and plan action against the scourge of racism peddled by the right. DANIEL KEBEDE urges mass participation
The drift toward militarisation in Europe is not inevitable, left-wing and peace movements can preserve sovereignty and prevent war, says DÁIRE HUGHES MP
Whatever differences exist among international sympathisers of the Bolivarian revolution about its current trajectory, they should unite against the imperialist power that is the source of an enforced retreat, argues ROGER D HARRIS
Trade unions need to step up and force a turn in the policies of the labour movement to effectively confront the far-right threat, argues NICK WRIGHT
THE correspondence between Marx, Engels and others occupies several volumes of the 50-volume Collected Works. The correspondence, of course, is not a diary and much is rightly taken up with the theory and practice of politics.
Yet there are passages which reflect Marx and Engels’ life in mid-Victorian England and how they viewed affairs in what was then the predominant capitalist power. These insights often informed their political and theoretical work and they also take away from the right-wing stereotype that Marx and Engels were iconoclasts untroubled by the issues and difficulties of daily life.
While Christmas had been reinstated as a holiday period in the 1850s, partly thanks to the efforts of Charles Dickens, the marking of Easter developed more slowly. Good Friday, then as now, was an important Christian occasion but Easter Monday did not become a public holiday until after the 1871 Bank Holidays Act. Before then, cheap rail excursions for the working class had started to become a feature.
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It may have become a traditional month for holidays, but episodes from early British labour movement history show that class struggle never takes time off, argues KEITH FLETT
The Isle of Wight’s Victorian holiday boom drew visitors from across Europe, including the founders of scientific socialism, writes KEITH FLETT
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
It’s not just the Starmer regime: the workers of Britain have always faced legal affronts on their right to assemble and dissent, and the Labour Party especially has meddled with our freedoms from its earliest days, writes KEITH FLETT