ANDREW MURRAY breaks down this week’s rift in the new left party that was at one point polling at 15 per cent of the vote without even having formed — whether it will form now has been thrown into a pit of doubt
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Thatcher’s Tory leadership victory at 50
KEITH FLETT looks back 50 years to when the Iron Lady was elected Tory leader…
EVEN FURTHER RIGHT: Margaret Thatcher
meets the press outside her Chelsea home
after her leadership victory in 1975
DIANE ABBOTT MP argues we shouldn’t see last week’s march as an inarticulate outpouring of confused class consciousness, arguing that the agenda was set by the stars of the international far right, whose speeches were explicit, extreme and unopposed
ROGER McKENZIE argues that the BRI represents a choice between treating humans as commodities or as equals — an essential project when, aside from China’s efforts, hundreds of millions worldwide are trapped in poverty
Our annual memorial event and lecture honouring a legend of English working-class history, who ‘organised the unorganisable’ in the countryside, will hear from today’s organisers of the unorganisable fighting the bosses of Amazon, writes NICK MATTHEWS
BERNADETTE KEAVENEY announces a simplified and streamlined way to get your paper delivered daily, and a big push for new readers that we can all help make into a success
Morning Star editor BEN CHACKO reports from the start of Kunming’s Belt and Road media forum, where 200 journalists from 71 countries celebrated a new openness and optimism, forged by China’s enormous contribution to global development
IT’S 50 YEARS since Margaret Thatcher was elected Tory leader. Ted Heath had lost two elections to Labour in February and October 1974 and was eventually forced to call a leadership election in February 1975. He lost in the first round of voting on February 4 to a right-wing outsider — Thatcher. In the second ballot she got a majority of all Tory MPs over four other middle-aged white men in suits and became Tory leader. Just over four years later in May 1979 she became prime minister.
The 50th anniversary has already been marked by a two-part recreation of an interview Brian Walden did with her in 1989. An opera written by social historian Dominic Sandbrook is due later this year.
Thatcher’s victory was unexpected, not least because she represented a rightward shift in Tory politics — even if anyone active in the early 1970s in the labour movement would have thought Heath with his hard line anti-union stance was quite right-wing enough.
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