DENNIS BROE gives an update on the last week of anti-austerity protests against the Macron regime, which has seen the supposedly more right-leaning Gilets Jaunes join with the unions and the left
Britain’s political landscape is being redrawn by an insurgent right
In the first of two pieces, NICK WRIGHT examines the rise of Reform UK and its parallels with France’s National Rally, warning of the dangers that lie ahead for a left without convincing answers to rising anti-immigration sentiment
GAINING GROUND: Reform UK MPs Nigel Farage (left) and Lee Anderson
JOHN PERRY and FRANCISCO DOMINGUEZ unpack the latest propaganda attack on Nicaragua, explaining how a clearly biased, US-backed regime-change NGO used a totally unrepresentative sample and survey methodology to get a ridiculous result
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
ANDREW MURRAY breaks down this week’s rift in the new left party that was at one point polling at 15 per cent of the vote without even having formed — whether it will form now has been thrown into a pit of doubt
DIANE ABBOTT MP argues we shouldn’t see last week’s march as an inarticulate outpouring of confused class consciousness, arguing that the agenda was set by the stars of the international far right, whose speeches were explicit, extreme and unopposed
BERNADETTE KEAVENEY announces a simplified and streamlined way to get your paper delivered daily, and a big push for new readers that we can all help make into a success
BRITAIN’S electoral map has changed with a significant shift in the voting behaviour of both the working class and the middle class.
The archaic disposition of seats in the Westminster Parliament — with His Majesty’s loyal ministers seated on one side of the chamber and His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition on the opposite benches draws on the liturgical traditions of the Christian church and formalises a now redundant disposition of political forces.
The greater diversity of political tendencies now present in Parliament — even though the deeply undemocratic FPTP system still distorts the real relations between the contending forces — would be better represented by the adoption of the republican model of a parliament, like the French and Scottish assemblies.
There the people’s representatives sit in an arc modelled on the epic theatre of classical antiquity which, in the modern era, reveals more clearly the distinctions between the new alignments of the reactionary right and hints at a new popular left constellation.
We should make the grotesque Palace of Westminster even more of a museum of oddities and build a new parliament of the people wherever HS2 eventually terminates.
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Within politics, the tectonic plates are shifting and we need to devise a strategy that puts the working class at the centre of political progress on its own account while taking account of the newly salient fact that voting behaviour is far more complex than is accounted for by Westminster’s archaic geometry.
The Communist Party’s election co-ordinator Phil Katz reports that voters often agreed with the party’s economic policies but, on a variety of issues, thought a vote for Reform UK expressed their opinions.
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