FRAN HEATHCOTE believes that while the the Chancellor outlined some positive steps, the government does not appreciate the scale of the cost-of-living crisis affecting working-class people, whose lives are blighted by endemic low pay
The Watling Estate: 100 years of a working-class housing experiment
Former resident LEO WOODLAND looks at the first century of a visionary project that saw almost 4,000 homes built in a vast pastoral setting in the suburbs, home first to exiles from central London’s slums to waves of migrants today
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is pouring €11.5bn into the Kiev swamp, blocking Trump’s peace plan, and pushing Nato right up to Russia’s borders – no matter if it costs hundreds of thousands of lives, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN
The 2025 Budget shores up the PM’s political position with headline-grabbing welfare U-turns, but with no improvements on offer to declining public services or living standards, writes MICHAEL BURKE
The unifying victory of Irish progressive forces in the presidential campaign should be a salutary lesson to the left in this country, argues MARY GRIFFITHS CLARKE
Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
A November 15 protest in Mexico – driven by a right-wing social-media operation – has been miscast as a mass uprising against President Sheinbaum. In reality, the march was small, elite-backed and part of a wider attempt to sow unrest, argues DAVID RABY
THE neighbours weren’t happy, of course. Mill Hill’s leafy mansions had provided two mayors of London, plus William Wilberforce — and Sir James Murray, who founded the Oxford English Dictionary.
Now, they were to have thousands of London’s impoverished working class on their doorstep. Children used to tenements would lead gangs of thieves, they insisted. Their parents would create a Little Moscow.
It’s true that Burnt Oak was an unlikely choice. It’s the last but one stop on London’s Northern line and then so remote that its station opened only in 1924, and then just at weekends.
Similar stories
Incoming Usdaw general secretary JOANNE THOMAS talks to Ben Chacko about workers’ rights, Labour and how to arrest the decline of the high street
ALAN SIMPSON warns that Starmer’s triangulation strategy will fail just as New Labour’s did, with each rightward move by Labour pushing Tories further right
‘Chance encounters are what keep us going,’ says novelist Haruki Murakami. In Amy, a chance encounter gives fresh perspective to memories of angst, hedonism and a charismatic teenage rebel.
Attempts at haggling to win a deal over the Scottish Budget still leave public services short-changed, writes MATT KERR