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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The two kinds of social democracy
NICK WRIGHT looks at the problems Labour governments face
Former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey
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
LABOUR’s chancellor of the exchequer Denis Healey is rightly regarded as a heavyweight among post-war politicians. An ardent communist at Oxford before the second world war, Healey was among the brightest of his generation — schooled in Marxist dialectics and the anti-fascist political culture of that era, trained by the Communist Party in a period when intellectuals were drawn to a party whose main cadres were factory workers and miners and whose heroes fought in the International Brigades.
His communism did not survive the war which saw him promoted through the ranks. He was demobbed as a major and, still in uniform, told delegates to the 1945 Labour Party conference: “the upper classes in every country are selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent.”
The Cold War saw him as top functionary of the Labour Party’s international department at a time when this body marched in lockstep with British and US intelligence services as these organisations collaborated with the operatives of the Gehlen nazi intelligence apparatus in a futile effort to stem the advance of socialism in the countries that had been liberated by the Red Army. A not subsidiary function was to advise on the management of Britain’s colonies.
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