General secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions GAWAIN LITTLE calls for support and participation in the national partnership organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1926 general strike
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Britain’s communist guerilla who launched the WWII ‘Dad’s Army’
A crucial part of the war effort, the Home Guard, was launched partly due to the influence of Tom Wintringham, a revolutionary communist with a passion for DIY grenades and guerilla warfare, writes MAT COWARD
A PEOPLE’S ARMY: A broomstick parade on a London roof by a City firm’s staff eager to support the Home Guard, May 1940
After brutal police crackdowns on pensioners and the forced approval of secret IMF deals, trade unions are finally responding to grassroots pressure and fighting back against savage neoliberal reforms, reports BERT SCHOUWENBURG
Bizarrely, Trump’s latest attacks now include the National Zoo, but his real and racist agenda is to strip everything black from the country’s cultural institutions, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
The economic value of disability benefits far outweighs their cost, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY
As tensions rise in the Middle East, the role of Iran in the region’s political balance becomes ever more significant. STEVE BISHOP assesses the current situation
WHEN he was in his nineties, former Labour leader Michael Foot was asked by the BBC how he would have reacted if Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, had made peace with Hitler in 1940. “I’d have killed him,” said Footy. And he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.
In the run-up to the second world war, a number of unorthodox leftwingers had come to the conclusion that Britain could only win against Germany if it underwent a socialist revolution. This would inevitably involve a degree of civil war and the formation of workers’ militias.
As it turned out, of course, they were wrong. Britain remained capitalist — although forced, for the sake of efficiency and productivity, to temporarily adopt some socialistic measures — and yet successfully resisted invasion. But at the time, their views made a lot of sense to a lot of people.
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