Zarah Sultana’s recent brave criticisms of Labour from 2015 to 2020, including Brexit triangulation, IHRA capitulation and insufficient fighting spirit, have ruffled feathers but started an essential discussion, writes ANDREW MURRAY

THE extraordinary first year of Covid obscured the scale of the crisis facing labour movement politics.
Now, like a dam breaching, the results of last week’s elections in England have unleashed a flood of realisation. The danger is this: sinking now or clinging to bits of driftwood only to sink later.
Last week was not itself an epochal shift. It was the latest imprimatur upon changes that have been underway for two decades. It means some fundamental questioning about the state we are in as a labour and socialist movement. That is true not only in Britain but across Europe and elsewhere.

A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN

As Starmer flies to Albania seeking deportation camps while praising Giorgia Meloni, KEVIN OVENDEN warns that without massive campaigns rejecting this new overt government xenophobia, Britain faces a soaring hard right and emboldened fascist thugs on the streets

