ANSELM ELDERGILL draws attention to a legal case on Tuesday in which a human rights group is challenging the government’s decision to allow the sale of weapons used against Palestinians
Latest editorial
The shop floor stories British fiction ignores
Our homegrown literary scene seems stuck in a bit of a middle-class bubble with a key sector deeply unrepresented in the stories it tells: retail workers. Ireland and the US do much better, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
RETAIL TALES: Nearly a tenth of the British workers work in retail — but don’t star in our books and novels
The obfuscation of Nazism’s capitalist roots has seen imperialism redeploy fascism again and again — from the killing fields of Guatemala to the war in Ukraine, writes PAWEL WARGAN
From Workers’ Memorial Day to May Day rallies, TOM MORRISON examines the real challenges facing the labour movement as Reform UK’s glossy literature exploits legitimate grievances in traditional left strongholds
Calls have been made for the return to Venezuela of a two-year-old girl currently being held in the US, after being separated from her family by immigration officials, reports SUSAN GREY
In the first of two articles, DANIEL POWELL investigates the causal aspects of the Russo-Ukrainian war as Britain commemorates 80 years since VE Day
THE British fiction scene just doesn’t support enough novels about working in shops. This thought popped into my head while reading two recent novels, which both build on retail experience.
Both are, rightly, I think, highly recommended. Neither are British. The absent shopworker is another sign of how the current British fiction scene doesn’t really reflect the Britain we live in. Some 2.7 million Brits — nearly a tenth of the workforce — work in retail. But like a lot of other working people, their lives are not well reflected in British novels.
The first book is Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident, which appeared in paperback this year. It’s a funny, bittersweet comedy about being a young adult, about those first steps when you make your best friends and worst choices.
More from this author
Secret consultation documents finally released after the Morning Star’s two-year freedom of information battle show the Home Office misrepresented public opinion, claiming support for policies that most respondents actually strongly criticised as dangerous and unfair, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
Despite Labour’s promises to bring things ‘in-house,’ the Justice Secretary has awarded notorious outsourcing outfit Mitie a £329 million contract to run a new prison — despite its track record of abuse and neglect in its migrant facilities, reports SOLOMON HUGHES
Why is the Labour government so addicted to giving government jobs to Tories when it spent so long trying to oust them? In the hope the favour is returned the next time the Tories return to power, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
