Honduras may not be as much in the spotlight as Venezuela and Cuba right now, but Trump's circling vultures are making their move. JOHN PERRY reports
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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
With the illegitimate partition of Palestine, and inflicting ongoing terror on Palestinians, Israel and the US continue to smash down the basic principles of democracy
NICK WRIGHT returns to Berlin and finds a city in darkness and political turmoil
Data on regional deprivation in England shows us an unequal society, but what to do about it remains unanswered argue ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
FRANCISCO DOMINGUEZ considers Trump’s war on Venezuela as tentative prelude to US recolonisation of Latin America by military force
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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The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
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