SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
The silence of Starmer
The PM’s lack of any meaningful comment on the wave of far-right violence to sweep Britain is remarkable – and is linked to his reluctance to show solidarity with targeted Muslim communities, says ANDREW MURRAY
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during his visit to Lambeth Police Headquarters in London, August 9, 2024
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
KEIR STARMER has handled the far-right riots as a policeman rather than a politician.
Any previous premier would surely have addressed the country in one form or another after such a signal crisis. Margaret Thatcher — even Boris Johnson — would have had something substantive to say, however misjudged.
As for Tony Blair, he felt the need to speak to and for the nation, lip trembling, after the death of the “people’s princess” in a Paris underpass, an event of no general significance at all except in so far as it highlighted the emotional intelligence deficit in the House of Windsor.
More from this author
Incredibly, US Republican states are systematically dismantling child labour protections, with children transformed back into the cheap, disposable workers of the Dickens era, reports ANDREW MURRAY
ANDREW MURRAY casts an eye over past upheavals and asks whether the left can find a fire escape before the world goes up in flames
But Business Secretary downplays prospect of full nationalisation and declines to extend emergency assistance to Port Talbot or Grangemouth
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