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
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Plaw Hatch Farm and Tablehurst: a socialist countryside prefigured?
These twin Sussex co-ops selling their produce directly to locals offers a glimpse of a future of sustainable, democratised food production – all in harmony with nature, says DAVE BANGS
Plaw Hatch Farm
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
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Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
The economic value of disability benefits far outweighs their cost, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY
As tensions rise in the Middle East, the role of Iran in the region’s political balance becomes ever more significant. STEVE BISHOP assesses the current situation
MOST socialists who love the countryside and nature will have ideas about what a socialist countryside would be like. They may have model projects that they think prefigure that future.
For myself, those ideas would include the return of land-based labour on a large scale to the countryside and the long-term replacement of giant cities by a settlement pattern that combines the advantages of urban and rural living.
Something, maybe, like the pattern of the best of the old South Yorkshire coalfield, where industrial mining villages were scattered in a lacework of woods, rich farms of corn and pasture, lakes, small meandering rivers, grazing marsh and moor.
More from this author
From John Clare country to ancient fenland, Ed Miliband’s solar farm approvals risk industrialising precious rural spaces — we must find greener solutions that don’t sacrifice our countryside’s beauty, writes DAVE BANGS
Decades of right to buy have eroded the social balance of our countryside — and now holiday lets and second home owners from the cities are compounding the crisis, writes DAVE BANGS
Spring has sprung in all its glory — but DAVE BANGS is disturbed by the absence of a crucial sound
