Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT
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In tribute to an unflinching class fighter and stalwart of the NUM
Remembering KEN CAPSTICK, vice-president of the National Union of Mineworkers Yorkshire Area
Ken Capstick, former vice-chairman of the NUM’s Yorkshire Area
Scotland has become one of the world’s most foreign-owned economies, and our political elite celebrates these sell-offs as success — we need to ask how supposedly progressive nationalism has enabled corporate capture, writes DR JAMES FOLEY
When the latest round of hysteria reached our town, we successfully organised and stopped it reaching the asylum centre gates as the far right had planned — but we need to have answers for the local residents who joined their demonstration, writes NICK WRIGHT
A ‘new phase’ for Starmerism is fairly similar to the old phase – only worse. ANDREW MURRAY takes a look
Macron is seeking a centrist replacement for the pro-austerity French PM, while the emergence of the grassroots Bloquons Tout movement means for the left there’s a period of struggle ahead – and all to play for, writes BILL GREENSHIELDS
The Met Police arrested a staggering 890 people, many elderly, disabled, and even blind in a single demonstration — all to back up the government’s unhinged campaign against non-violent civil disobedience at the behest of Israel, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
THE labour and trade union movement has lost one of its most respected activists with the death of Ken Capstick, who for more than half-a-century was a tower of strength in the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and close friend and comrade to former NUM president Arthur Scargill.
Capstick, 84, died in Bulgaria where he was visiting his son David. He was born in the Yorkshire mining community of Hemsworth and trained as an electrician in the coalmining industry, becoming an activist in the NUM. He worked at Park Hill colliery in Wakefield. When Park Hill closed in 1982 he transferred to the huge Selby coalfield.
A decade earlier he was involved in the Battle of Saltley Gate, when engineering workers in the Midlands downed tools to reinforce striking miners picketing a coking depot, successfully closing it down.
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With solidarity coming in from across Britain and the world, PETER LAZENBY speaks to the people who made Christmas 1984 a celebration of working-class resistance in Britain’s striking coalmining communities