As Colombia approaches presidential elections next year, the US decision to decertify the country in the war on drugs plays into the hands of its allies on the political right, writes NICK MacWILLIAM
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
The move against alleged PKK members that sparked outrage as a community centre in north London was raided last year has now come to trial, writes TONY BURKE, but in the meantime, the peace process abroad has changed the situation almost entirely
A new report points a way to overcome complacent framing of climate issues, ‘by sparking a wider public reckoning with climate realities,’ and reconnecting with working-class people. IAN SINCLAIR reports
We cannot understand today’s world without understanding the rise of China – and we cannot understand China without understanding how it was shaped by the second world war, writes JENNY CLEGG
NICK WRIGHT reports from Italy, where 80 cities saw Gaza strikes as unions paralysed transport and massive crowds clashed with police in Milan — but France is also kicking off, and Westminster, in a very different way, is facing a crisis of legitimacy too
Escalating anti-China rhetoric from the West has a clear purpose – to manufacture consent for the new cold war, and potentially a hot one, argues CARLOS MARTINEZ
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.
More from this author
In 1981, towering figure for the British left Tony Benn came a whisker away from victory, laying the way for a wave of left-wing Labour Party members, MPs and activism — all traces of which are now almost entirely purged by Starmer, writes KEITH FLETT
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
KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
