As the Stop the War Coalition holds its annual conference, ANDREW MURRAY warns that Britain’s alignment with US foreign policy is fuelling global instability and diverting billions from welfare, wages and public services
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Will you wear a poppy, be it red or white?
As Poppy Day approaches, PETER FROST explains some of the history of that bright evocative flower
ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the tension between treating children as vulnerable dependants and recognising them as citizens with rights
The tightening of protest rights reflects a broader shift toward repression in Britain’s strained liberal democracy. Socialists and trade unionists must be ready to resist further attacks on our freedoms, warns JOHN McINALLY
Until ministers stop deferring to the market and start drawing hard lines, the public will remain at the mercy of private power, says MATT KERR
As the US intensifies its economic and political pressure it is now vitally important to demand the British government intervene to end US aggression, writes GEOFF BOTTOMS
SEVIM DAGDELEN argues that a legal framework exists for a closure of US and Nato military base in Ramstein
THE curious summer we have had, be it through human-made climate change, or just luck as President Donald Trump would have you believe, means that the red corn poppy, Britain’s most colourful weed, is still to be seen on roadside verges even as we approach November 11 — Armistice Day.
Poppies will be a big part of the events that mark the centenary of the end of the war to end all wars — but sadly the war that didn’t end wars at all. Over that century the simple poppy came to mean all kinds of things to all kinds of people and not always for the best.
So which will you wear? My wife Ann always wears a red poppy. She wears it in proud memory of her dad Fred who always wore his red poppy in memory of his own father, another Fred, Ann’s grandfather.
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