FRAN HEATHCOTE believes that while the the Chancellor outlined some positive steps, the government does not appreciate the scale of the cost-of-living crisis affecting working-class people, whose lives are blighted by endemic low pay
‘Here I am, whether you like it or not!’
Louise Raw talks to grime legend and ‘mistress of clashing’ LADY SHOCKER about her east London roots, the energy of the youth circuit and the challenges of being a woman in a male-led industry
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is pouring €11.5bn into the Kiev swamp, blocking Trump’s peace plan, and pushing Nato right up to Russia’s borders – no matter if it costs hundreds of thousands of lives, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN
The 2025 Budget shores up the PM’s political position with headline-grabbing welfare U-turns, but with no improvements on offer to declining public services or living standards, writes MICHAEL BURKE
The unifying victory of Irish progressive forces in the presidential campaign should be a salutary lesson to the left in this country, argues MARY GRIFFITHS CLARKE
Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
A November 15 protest in Mexico – driven by a right-wing social-media operation – has been miscast as a mass uprising against President Sheinbaum. In reality, the march was small, elite-backed and part of a wider attempt to sow unrest, argues DAVID RABY
LIKE grime music itself, Lady Shocker was born and bred in Bow.
Writing her first lyrics as a schoolgirl and hanging out with renowned Grime MCs like Wiley and God’s Gift, “Shocks” went on to form Female Allstars (FA), grime’s first all-woman “crew.”
Grime was no record company invention, but a real working-class movement “from the streets,” as Shocks puts it.
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