Employment lawyer ALICE BOWMAN warns ‘day one rights’ include an undefined ‘initial period’ and the zero-hours contract fixes create baffling fixed-term loopholes. If the Bill doesn’t work properly and deliver, Labour is doomed
Latest editorial
No empire dies quietly: the violent twilight of US dominance
With trade wars backfiring, allies resisting military demands, and approval ratings plummeting, Trump’s dangerous pursuit of colonial ambitions threatens to end the ‘American century’ with catastrophic conflict, warns CLAUDIA WEBBE
DEFIANT: Mexican
President Claudia
Sheinbaum
The protests against the US presidential visit are over, but the public probably doesn’t know that new US nuclear bombs are now stationed here, putting us all in danger — we have to raise awareness and get them out, writes CND’s KATE HUDSON
In a speech to the 12th Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, SEVIM DAGDELEN warns of a growing historical revisionism to whitewash Germany and Japan’s role in WWII as part of a return to a cold war strategy from the West — but multipolarity will win out
CLAUDIA WEBBE argues that Labour gains nothing from its adoption of right-wing stances on immigration, and seems instead to be deliberately paving the way for the far right to become an established force in British politics, as it has already in Europe
DENNIS BROE gives an update on the last week of anti-austerity protests against the Macron regime, which has seen the supposedly more right-leaning Gilets Jaunes join with the unions and the left
JOHN PERRY and FRANCISCO DOMINGUEZ unpack the latest propaganda attack on Nicaragua, explaining how a clearly biased, US-backed regime-change NGO used a totally unrepresentative sample and survey methodology to get a ridiculous result
ALMOST 15 years ago, historian Alfred McCoy wrote predicting that “the demise of the US as the global superpower could come … in 2025.” He was probably a little early in his prediction, though there is still time for him to be proven correct.
McCoy envisaged a world in which China, India, Iran and Russia would all “provocatively challenge” the dominion of the “fading superpower” and that the US would be riven with “violent clashes and divisive debates” and run by a “far-right patriot” president threatening military and economic punishment for anyone who dared challenge US hegemony.
So prescient was his prediction that McCoy revisited his analysis in The Nation last November and found little cause for changing his forecast.
However, in one key aspect, I suspect he may be wrong. McCoy expects that the “American century ends in silence,” with the world paying little attention despite the threats and belligerence of Trump and his cohort, but the signs are that the US empire will not die quietly.
So far, the reaction of most Western nations and China to Trump’s economic threats has been fairly resolute: Canada responded to his 25 per cent duty on most Canadian imports in a reciprocal manner and is negotiating a new market with the EU for its energy in the face of the 10 per cent tariff imposed on that.
China has imposed retaliatory tariffs on US goods, Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum faced down Trump, threatening tit-for-tat tariffs and warning that her country would simply sell its products elsewhere.
More from this author
The Met Police arrested a staggering 890 people, many elderly, disabled, and even blind in a single demonstration — all to back up the government’s unhinged campaign against non-violent civil disobedience at the behest of Israel, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
CLAUDIA WEBBE says a UN agency’s finding that Gaza’s famine, killing up to 400 people a day, is entirely man-made must prompt a renewed revolt against our government’s complicity in this horror
Starmer’s decision to suspend Diane Abbott yet again demonstrates a determination to maintain and propagate a hierarchy of racism, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
The New York mayoral candidate has electrified the US public with policies of social justice and his refusal to be cowed. We can follow his example here, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
