Both Conservative and Labour administrations have now refused to release research showing PIP payments are vital for disabled people’s survival, exposing the ideological nature of planned welfare ‘reforms,’ writes Dr DYLAN MURPHY
Battle of Holbeck Moor: don’t let them erase the communists
An attempt to give the church credit for the mobilisation of 30,000 anti-fascists in Leeds in 1936 is an insult to the communists and socialists who fought the fascists, writes SAM KIRK
Western media dismisses the National People’s Congress while ignoring its extensive consultation processes, massive public participation mechanisms, and a tiered structure involving millions of deputies, explains JENNY CLEGG
Despite caring for vulnerable children and often covering classes, support staff remain undervalued, with some earning less than supermarket workers — but GMB’s campaigning offers new hope, argues DONNA SPICER
NICK WRIGHT examines how Farage’s party has attracted five distinct voter tribes with incompatible views on economics, immigration and state intervention — presenting both a challenge and opportunity for left organising
Man-made canals like Panama and Suez face unprecedented challenges from extreme weather patterns and geopolitical tensions that reveal the fragility of our global trade networks, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
As climate change makes vast mineral deposits accessible, the island’s 56,000 residents face unprecedented pressure from Trump’s territorial ambitions while struggling to maintain their traditional way of life, writes JOHN GREEN
Student Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest and threatened deportation are terrifying — but the moribund Democrats are still failing to mount any meaningful resistance against the slide toward autocracy, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
IT has long been recognised that Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, has anti-semitic tropes and has been problematic in a world where this is abhorrent.
This new version is set in 1936 at a time when Oswald Mosley was trying to build The British Union of Fascists (BUF) along the same lines as Hitler and Mussolini.
By setting the play in these times, the role of Shylock is based on writer and actor Tracy-Ann Oberman’s grandmother who fought against Mosley at the Battle of Cable Steet.
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The mobilisation in 1936 of 30,000 anti-fascists to drive Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts out of Leeds has been commemorated in the city, reports PETER LAZENBY
JIM JUMP welcomes the new booklet published by the RMT and International Brigade Memorial Trust about the seafarers and rail workers who fought Franco’s fascism in Spain
DAVID HORSLEY honours the black British communist who fought the fascists from Cable Street, to Spain, to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany