This year’s Bristol Radical History Festival focused on the persistent threats of racism, xenophobia and, of course, our radical collective resistance to it across Ireland and Britain, reports LYNNE WALSH
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Subsidy bonanza: the great train robbery continues
‘Our’ train companies — mostly partly owned from abroad — are trousering millions of taxpayer cash, as usual, reports SOLOMON HUGHES
A maverick’s self-inflicted snake bites could unlock breakthrough treatments – but they also reveal deeper tensions between noble scientific curiosity and cold corporate callousness, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
The FBU is demanding 52 weeks of full pay for women firefighters, highlighting the unique health risks they face — and the continuing need to recruit and retain more women if policies like this are still not in place, writes SEONA HART
Israel continues to operate with impunity in what seems to be a brutal and protracted experiment, while much of the world looks on, says RAMZY BAROUD
A new report by Amnesty International pulls no punches in highlighting the Labour government’s human rights violations of those on benefits, says Dr DYLAN MURPHY
With Reform UK surging and Labour determined not to offer anything different from the status quo, a clear opportunity opens for the left, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE
A recent Immigration Summit heard from Lord Alf Dubs, who fled the Nazis to Britain as a child. JAYDEE SEAFORTH reports on his message that we need to increase public empathy with desperate people seeking asylum
THE latest accounts from the three train firms running the South Western Trains, Avanti West Coast, Thameslink, Great Northern, Southern and Gatwick Express rail franchises show these companies paid their owners a combined £69.5 million of dividends in 2022-23, despite depending on hundreds of millions in government subsidy.
The subsidy that kept these firms going was both much bigger than their profits and their dividends, so really they paid out this money to their shareholders directly from government aid.
When Covid slashed passenger numbers in 2020, the government tore up all the existing rail contracts and moved to huge subsidies to keep rail moving: the rail companies kept their privately run, publicly granted transport monopolies, but the Department for Transport pumped in extra cash to keep the trains running.
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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
Despite Labour’s promises to bring things ‘in-house,’ the Justice Secretary has awarded notorious outsourcing outfit Mitie a £329 million contract to run a new prison — despite its track record of abuse and neglect in its migrant facilities, reports SOLOMON HUGHES
Why is the Labour government so addicted to giving government jobs to Tories when it spent so long trying to oust them? In the hope the favour is returned the next time the Tories return to power, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
Israel’s number one death dealer supplying the IDF in its murderous campaigns against the Palestinians is now actively wining and dining our military top brass, looking to flog its blood-soaked wares, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
