Now at 115,000 members and in some polls level with Labour in terms of public support, CHRIS JARVIS looks at the factors behind the rapid rise of the Greens, internal and external
The shop floor stories British fiction ignores
Our homegrown literary scene seems stuck in a bit of a middle-class bubble with a key sector deeply unrepresented in the stories it tells: retail workers. Ireland and the US do much better, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
RETAIL TALES: Nearly a tenth of the British workers work in retail — but don’t star in our books and novels
Witnessing a war of words at a meeting on tackling militarism at The World Transformed, BEN COWLES spoke to a union rep who is organising against war from inside the arms industry itself, to hear about worker-led solutions to ending weapons production
FRANCISCO DOMINGUEZ, ROGER D HARRIS and JOHN PERRY contrast Trump’s warships and F-35 fighters threatening Venezuela with the $20bn bailout for Milei’s collapsed economy, all enabled by a highly ideological IMF
KAY GREEN explains how the Middle East and colonialism were explored at at last weekend’s FiLiA conference
ROS SITWELL reports from Europe’s largest feminist conference – hosted this year in Brighton
Morning Star campaigns manager CALVIN TUCKER gives an update on the drive to raise £95,000 to see the people’s paper keep fighting the good fight against the rich and powerful
THE British fiction scene just doesn’t support enough novels about working in shops. This thought popped into my head while reading two recent novels, which both build on retail experience.
Both are, rightly, I think, highly recommended. Neither are British. The absent shopworker is another sign of how the current British fiction scene doesn’t really reflect the Britain we live in. Some 2.7 million Brits — nearly a tenth of the workforce — work in retail. But like a lot of other working people, their lives are not well reflected in British novels.
The first book is Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident, which appeared in paperback this year. It’s a funny, bittersweet comedy about being a young adult, about those first steps when you make your best friends and worst choices.
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