From London’s holly-sellers to Engels’s flaming Christmas centrepiece, the plum pudding was more than festive fare in Victorian Britain, says KEITH FLETT
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Berlin Wall: 30 years since the collapse of working-class power
NICK WRIGHT argues that we need to think how socialism can be defended
Once the bustling heart of Christian pilgrimage, Bethlehem now faces shuttered hotels, empty streets and a shrinking Christian community, while Israel’s assault on Gaza and the tightening grip of occupation destroy hopes of peace at the birthplace of Christ, writes Father GEOFF BOTTOMS
From a lockdown digital project to a vital tool for class solidarity, ROBERT POOLE and HENRY FOWLER reflect on half-a-decade of struggle
After years hidden away, Oldham’s memorial to six local volunteers who died fighting fascism in the Spanish civil war has been restored to public view, marking both a victory for campaigners and a renewed tribute to the town’s proud International Brigade heritage, says ROB HARGREAVES
The June 2025 attacks on Iran have heightened the risk of a wider war, exposed the fiction of a rules-based international order and left ordinary Iranians trapped between external aggression and internal repression, says the Committee for Defence of Iranian People’s Rights
While pretending to seek peace, Europe is heading toward a collision course with Russia – using security guarantees, troop deployments, expropriation and censorship as tools, writes SEVIM DAGDELEN
A WWI hero, renowned ornithologist, medical doctor, trade union organiser and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain all rolled in one. MAT COWARD tells the story of a life so improbable it was once dismissed as fiction
WHEN thousands of people streamed through the Berlin Wall 30 years ago it seemed to signify the defeat of an ideal, the end of an ideology and a value system. The Berlin Wall — or as it was described in socialist Germany, the Anti-fascist Protection Barrier — marked the boundary between two totally opposed social systems.
1989 ended the first era in which full public ownership defined the economies of any European state. The demise of the first anti-fascist state on German soil — in the modern context of the wholesale dismantling of socialism on our continent — raises vital questions which the working-class movement has yet to tackle.
If by revolution we mean a complete change in the way in which society is organised then the events of 1989 were a complete counter-revolution.
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