HENRY FOWLER, co-founder of Strike Map, announces a new collaboration with UnionMaps, integrating two important sets of data that will facilitate the labour movement in its analysis, planning and action
Media attacks on the left are nothing new
From the Chartists to left-wing councils in the ’80s to Tony Benn, all have received their share of vitriol from the right-wing press, says KEITH FLETT
Media attacks on leftwingers are nothing new. Tony Benn was often vilified in a similar manner to Jeremy Corbyn today
RICHARD BURGON MP reports that Cuba’s world-renowned medical programmes that support not only its citizens but countries worldwide are under strain from the US blockade, but the British labour movement can and must help
It’s hard to understand how minor divisions can come to dominate the process of building a challenge to the rule of the rich when the desperate need for a vehicle to fight poverty and despair is so abundantly clear, writes MATT KERR
Two-hundred years ago, on September 27 1825, the world’s first passenger railway line was opened between Stockton and Darlington. MICK WHELAN, general secretary of Aslef, the train drivers’ union, reflects on the history – and the future – of Britain’s railway industry
In Washington, the willingness to accept an open war with Russia is growing — at Europe’s expense. While Nato states are being drawn into confrontation, Europe risks becoming the battlefield of a potential world war, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN
GEOFF BOTTOMS charts the history of the Stockton & Darlington Railway 200 years ago, which served as a blueprint for the modern network and opened up a new era of working-class travel
VICTOR SERGE, the anarchist turned Bolshevik, and later critic of the direction the Russian Revolution was to take, wrote towards the end of his life in the late 1940s: “On several occasions a press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth.”
It is a reminder that attacks on left-wing activists and writers by media owned by the rich and powerful are nothing new.
Indeed in the 1840s the leaders of the Chartist movement were often to be found being vilified in the press. Particular attention was paid, by Punch for example, to caricaturing the black leader of London Chartism in 1848 William Cuffay.
More from this author
In 1981, towering figure for the British left Tony Benn came a whisker away from victory, laying the way for a wave of left-wing Labour Party members, MPs and activism — all traces of which are now almost entirely purged by Starmer, writes KEITH FLETT
Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT
KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT
