As food and fuel run out, Gaza’s doctors appeal to the world to end the ‘genocide of children,’ reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The Tory Party: 1834-2025?
KEITH FLETT traces how the ‘world’s most successful political party’ has imploded since Thatcher’s fall, from nine leaders in 30 years to losing all 16 English councils, with Reform UK symbolically capturing Peel’s birthplace, Tamworth — but the beast is not dead yet
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch at their local election campaign launch at The Curzon Centre in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, March 20, 2025
While Trump threatens to send Haitian gang leaders to El Salvador's terror prison, DANNY SHAW reveals how these paramilitary groups are merely symptoms of US-backed neocolonial rule — the real terrorists are the CIA and international actors arming desperate youth to traumatise an unarmed population
Having endured 14 years of Tory austerity followed by Starmerite cuts, young voters are desperate for change — but Anas Sarwar’s refusal to differentiate from Westminster means Scottish Labour risks electoral catastrophe, writes LAUREN HARPER
Mark Harvey pays tribute to a veteran of the days when the London building trade was a hotbed of working-class struggle, a legendary trade unionist, communist and poet
Rather than hoping for the emergence of some new ‘party of the left,’ EMMA DENT COAD sees a broad alliance of local parties and community groups as a way of reviving democratic progressive politics
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
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
THE TORIES were reduced to 121 seats on July 4 2024, with a range of well-known Tory MPs losing their seats. Whatever the view on Keir Starmer, there was cause for brief celebration on July 5, as there was on May 2 1997, when Blair came to office.
Tory leader Rishi Sunak resigned, and after a protracted leadership election, which suggested Tory membership was, in the autumn of 2024, at around 120,000, Kemi Badenoch defeated another hard-right candidate, Robert Jenrick.
On May 1 2025, the Tories lost all 16 English councils they were defending and over 600 councillors as well.
More from this author
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
From bemoaning London’s ‘cockneys’ invading seaside towns to negotiating holiday rents, the founders of scientific socialism maintained a wry detachment from Victorian Easter customs while using the break for health and politics, writes KEITH FLETT
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
Starmer’s slash-and-burn approach to disability benefits represents a fundamental break with Labour’s founding mission to challenge the idle rich rather than punish the vulnerable poor, argues KEITH FLETT
