Nearly two decades after leaving office, the former PM is still trumpeting the same futile militarism and failed free market dogmas. The question naturally arises: why does anyone still listen to him, says ANDREW MURRAY
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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
Very modest growth in membership serves to underline the need for a change of recruiting strategies, posits NIGEL FLANAGAN
DIANE ABBOTT debunks claims made politicians drumming up support for an enhanced militarisation of the British economy
The Morning Star’s AGM tour comes at a critical moment for both the British left and the newspaper itself, as it battles political fragmentation and media industry upheaval. Editor BEN CHACKO issues a clarion call to readers to play their part in the coming period
The growing argument that welfare must be sacrificed for ‘security’ is built on nothing but myth, argues MICHAEL BURKE
Esmond Romilly horrified Britain’s Establishment by turning from privileged schoolboy to anti-fascist fighter, writes MAT COWARD
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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