The Mandelson scandal reveals a political settlement in which democratic choice is curtailed and the power of markets eclipses the will of voters – only the left can challenge this, writes JON TRICKETT MP
Undercover officers in the left: what were they so afraid of?
Before they sent state agents to live as fake leftists, even fathering children with women activists, the government's initial panic-driven attempts to confront the rise in political consciousness amongst 1960s students shows how rotten the system was — and is, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
A demonstrator outside the Royal Courts of Justice, London, in October 2018
Corbyn’s intervention exposes a corrupted system, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
Paul Holden’s book, The Fraud, exposes a hidden war inside Labour, where claims of anti-semitism, amplified by media power and factional networks, were used to break Corbynism and recast the party. JOHN ELLISON revisits the scandals, investigations and suppressed evidence from that era
In the second of a series of articles, Storming the Heavens author JENNY CLEGG introduces the key themes of her book on the Chinese revolution
The growth of Cuba’s biotechnology sector is an example of how socialism can prioritise scientific innovation, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Paul Holden’s The Fraud reveals how a network of donors, MPs and opaque organisations quietly organised to destroy Corbyn’s leadership and manufacture a new centre of power inside Labour, writes JOHN ELLISON
Systems of power enable, excuse and normalise abuse, while survivors are ignored and women’s exploitation is repackaged as commerce and choice, warns CHARLIE WEINBERG
THIS WEEK the long-delayed Undercover Policing Inquiry began. In 2011 activists and journalists exposed undercover officers who had spent years infiltrating left-wing groups.
The undercovers didn’t stop any crime, but behaved in disgusting ways: they tricked women into long-term relationships and even fathered children under their assumed identities before disappearing back into the police. Revulsion at the undercover officers’ behaviour led to the inquiry.
In 1968 the government were scared of rising protest movements. But the Police could not recruit informants among the new protesters, so the Home Office agreed that officers should live undercover with the activists instead. The sinister practice continued for the next forty years.
Similar stories
Home Secretary Cooper confirms plans to ban the group and claims its peaceful activists ‘meet the legal threshold under the Terrorism Act 2000’
PETER LAZENBY is fascinated by a book of cartoons that shows how newspaper cartoonists were employed to, on the one hand, denigrade and, on the other, to defend the miners’ strike of 1984-85
