HENRY FOWLER, assistant general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU), reports on Day 2 from the GFTU’s residential Summer School at the Workers’ Retreat, Quorn Grange Hotel
AS a kid, the first I came across Ken Livingstone was on television in my living room in Portsmouth.
My dad said something like “good old Red Ken, he can really stick it to the Tories.” The second time, I was rooting through old Hansard speeches in the university library for an essay I was writing on Section 28.
His speech was courageous. At a time when the majority of people thought there was something morally outrageous about gay people — when Neil Kinnock was calling Peter Tatchell a “fairy” and Patricia Hewitt was writing memos bemoaning that “the gay and lesbian issue is costing us dear amongst the pensioners” — Livingstone was raining down oratorical fury on state-sanctioned homophobia.
MARJ MAYO recommends a well illustrated and very positive account of an extraordinary period in local government history
After Zohran Mamdani’s electoral win, BHABANI SHANKAR NAYAK points to the forgotten role of US communists in New York’s radical politics


