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
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The biggest petition: the Chartists’ demand for the vote, April 1848
Forget Farage and the recent daft demands for a new election against Labour: the greatest petition Britain has ever known gathered millions of names demanding the right to vote — and it didn’t work either, writes KEITH FLETT
TRULY MASSIVE: The great
Chartist meeting on Kennington
Common in London in 1848, was
supported by an even bigger petition
Despite new European arrests, the evidence presented so far fails to explain the sabotage of the undersea pipelines – and veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s allegations of US responsibility cannot be easily dismissed, writes ROGER McKENZIE
Groups are urging the US government to secure the 16-year old’s release as his mental and physical health decline dramatically after nine months inside Ofer prison, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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
As figures from Tucker Carlson to Nigel Farage flirt with neofascist rhetoric and mainstream leaders edge toward authoritarianism through war and repression, the conditions that once nurtured Hitlerism re-emerge — yet anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiments are also burgeoning anew, writes ANDREW MURRAY
As President Javier Milei is set to unveil a radical rollback of Argentina’s labour laws, unions warn of an unprecedented assault on workers’ rights, says BERT SCHOUWENBURG
PETITIONING Parliament has been part of the democratic repertoire of contention for many centuries. Some issues might seem unusual in 2024. A recent study has found that 30 per cent of petitions to the House of Commons between 1833 and 1918 were about drink and temperance.
Petitioning has been in the news again because of an online call promoted by Elon Musk and Nigel Farage for a new British general election to be held. It has gathered several million signatures, albeit from 183 countries. It falls very much into a favourite campaigning area of the hard right — that of manufactured outrage.
Moreover, it is certainly nowhere near the largest-ever petition in Britain. In recent times, several around Brexit have been larger. However, we need to look back to the Chartists for a petition that remains the largest in British history.
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