After months of uncertainty over printing and distribution, the first Scottish-printed edition of the Morning Star is soon to roll off the presses
Latest editorial
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
Some thinkers and authors on the right are openly discussing the possibility that the historically successful party of the British ruling class may be exhausted
Class struggle is the motor of history but the direction and detail of change at any time and place is the outcome of many factors, suggests the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
Merseyside’s proud tradition of internationalism is being kept alive through events organised by trade unionists and allies in the region, writes ROBERT MACDONALD
JOHNNIE HUNTER reports from the German Communist Party’s (DKP) weekly Unsere Zeit (Our Newspaper)-organised Peace Days festival in Berlin last weekend
Les Preger was one of Manchester’s first volunteers to volunteer in support of republican Spain, writes his daughter JANEY PREGER
TONY BURKE surveys the shifting political landscape and the challenges Labour needs to address if it is to prevail in the 2028 federal elections
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.
Similar stories
MAT COWARD introduces some of the electoral oddballs of the political fringe who remain one of the liveliest features of British democracy, despite efforts to abolish them
Long before modern labour movements, England’s farmworkers fought back against their oppression – and for some, like Elizabeth Studham, the price was exile to Australia. MAT COWARD tells the story
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
MAT COWARD tells the story of the eccentric founder of a short-lived but striking experiment in ‘vital democracy,’ who became best known for giving away his estate to the nation