The US Republican administration has wasted no time in tightening the economic vice on the Caribbean island, with State Department officials making it clear that the aggression is only just beginning, writes NATASHA HICKMAN
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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…
Any positives from the government’s green paper proposals are vastly overshadowed by the scale of the cuts to vulnerable low-income households, argues JENNY RATHBONE MS
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With young people, the disabled and the elderly in Labour’s sights as ‘easy targets’ for cuts, the labour movement must remember it’s in the vital interests of us all to defend the groups being picked off, writes DIANE ABBOTT MP
SOPHIE BOLT explains why Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is organising a national protest tour at nuclear bases, starting with a demo at BAE shipyard in Barrow, where Starmer and Healey have been banging the drum for war
The Employment Rights Bill is a vital opportunity to rebalance power between workers and employers. As it passes to the Lords, pressure must be brought to bear to strengthen this key legislation, argues ANDY McDONALD MP
The arrest of Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil is just the beginning as the Trump administration moves to silence students and union members who support Palestine, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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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Britain’s first woman Chancellor delivers the same old fudge, as Labour’s commitment to economic orthodoxy, seen throughout its history, always betrays working people, writes KEITH FLETT
KEITH FLETT reflects on the 1964 and 1974 election victories, arguing that despite years in power, Labour failed to fundamentally reshape society in the way Thatcher later would — a pattern Blair and now Starmer would follow
When there are more landlords in Parliament on the Labour benches than the Tories', whatever happens to her portrait, Thatcher is having the last laugh, writes ANDREW MURRAY
In the last of four extracts from his new memoir, the Star’s former industrial reporter recalls the opening shots — and at least one moment of glory — in what was to be a devastating decade for the union movement