Real security comes from having a secure base at home — Keir Starmer’s reckless and renegade decision to get Britain deeper into the proxy war against Russia is as dangerous as it is wasteful, writes SALLY SPIERS
Labour conference 2023: promises and prospects
NICK WRIGHT looks at the context behind Labour’s current position, what could do in power, what it is likely to do — and how the labour movement itself should react
Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer is joined by his wife Victoria after delivering his keynote speech to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. Picture date: Tuesday October 10, 2023.
The plan is to stigmatise and destabilise South Africa in preparation for breaking it up while creating a confused and highly racialised atmosphere around immigration in the US to aid in denying rights to non-white refugees, explains EMILE SCHEPERS
ALAN SIMPSON warns that Starmer’s triangulation strategy will fail just as New Labour’s did, with each rightward move by Labour pushing Tories further right
From the 1917 Balfour Declaration to today’s F-35 sales, Britain’s historical responsibility has now evolved into support for the present-day outright genocide. But our solidarity movement is growing too, writes BEN JAMAL
DIANE ABBOTT MP warns Starmer’s newly declared war on foreigners and scroungers won’t fix housing or services — only class struggle against austerity can do that, and defeat Farage in the process
Ben Chacko talks to ALAN MARDGHUM of the Durham Miners Association about Reform UK‘s dangerous inroads into Durham’s long-standing Labour county council; why he cancelled his party membership; and the political class’s disconnect from working people
Speaking to a CND meeting in Cambridge this week, SIMON BRIGNELL traced how the alliance’s anti-communist machinery broke unions, diverted vital funds from public services, and turned workers into cannon fodder for profit
LABOUR’S Liverpool conference basked in the expectation that the victory over the Scottish nationalists at Rutherglen heralds a return to the days when the party could rely on a substantial, even inflated, block of Scottish seats.
The rough parity that First Past the Post (FPTP) voting provided in the post-war period has eroded — remember the Conservatives were the biggest Scottish party in 1968 — and the post-independence referendum wipeout of Labour's Scottish contingent, only temporarily mitigated by the return of a handful of extra MPs generated by the 2017 Corbyn surge, looks like ending.
Naturally, Labour has spun the Rutherglen by-election figures as signalling a massive increase in Labour's Scottish presence at Westminster. The victory margin was substantial but the peculiarities of the seat — it alternates between the SNP and Labour — and the general crisis of the SNP and independence movement as a whole, helped Labour.
More from this author
The left must avoid shouting ‘racist’ and explain that the socialist alternative would benefit all
The left must confront both far-right bigotry and the undeniable problems the exploitation of migrant workers by the ruling class creates — but there are few lessons from the global left on how to strike this balance, laments NICK WRIGHT
Xenophobic hysteria over the statistically insignificant number of small-boat crossings deliberately conceals how capitalism manipulates population flows for profit — if we can explain that, we’ll beat the right, argues NICK WRIGHT
NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
