As Palestine Action prisoners go weeks without food, alleging dangerous neglect and detention without trial, campaigners warn that a near-total media blackout is hiding a crisis that could turn fatal – and fuel a growing wave of public anger. ELIZABETH SHORT reports
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As good as New
MAT COWARD tells of a pioneering suffragette and one of the first direct actionists, who’s commemorated in a street name in Swindon
As the new party emerges from its founding conference with a bold socialist identity, its future hinges on whether it can provide the organisational clarity needed to turn class sentiment into class power, argues NICK WRIGHT
RICHARD BURGON MP argues the left must build on recent victories and urgently unite around a bold cost-of-living programme
Far-right forces are rising across Latin America and the Caribbean, armed with a common agenda of anti-communism, the culture war, and neoliberal economics, writes VIJAY PRASHAD
Barred from returning home, a group of Greek Brigaders came to Britain and founded the League for Democracy in Greece – a movement that carried the flame of anti-fascist resistance from the 1930s through the cold war and beyond. ALI BASSAM ZAHID tells the story
Your Party can become an antidote to Reform UK – but only by rooting itself in communities up and down the country, says CLAUDIA WEBBE
FAMOUS inventors often get streets named after them, and in Swindon there’s one called Edith New Close. Edith was one of two women who invented smashing windows by throwing stones through them.
Edith Bessie New was born in Swindon, Wiltshire, in 1877. Her father, a railway clerk, died the following year (hit by a train while off duty) and at the age of 14 Edith was already working as a teacher at a primary school. By the turn of the century she had become a qualified teacher and moved to London.
She soon became involved in the campaign to win votes for women, having heard suffrage campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst and Labour politician Keir Hardie speak at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. She evidently hurled herself into the battle with few restraints, because her first arrest came a few months later, in March 1907. A peaceful lobbying of the House of Commons was met with police brutality and turned into a battle. Edith was one of 75 women arrested, and had her first taste of life as a prisoner. It was far from her last.
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