SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
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The unpopularity of immigration remains a dilemma for the left
The left must confront both far-right bigotry and the undeniable problems the exploitation of migrant workers by the ruling class creates — but there are few lessons from the global left on how to strike this balance, laments NICK WRIGHT
ANGER GROWS: Protesters demonstrate in Dover against migrants in small boats crossing the Channel from France, 2020
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
IF the world turned upside down by recent events — encompassing the never-ending wars of imperialism, the 2008 financial crash, Labour’s complete degeneration and the cataclysmic split in the US ruling class — has taught us one thing it is that elaborate programmatic schemes inevitably come to grief on the rocks of a reality that is impossible to predict with any certainty.
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party drawn up in 1848 for the First International, its authors argued that the formulation “Workers of all lands unite” should replace the motto adopted by the utopian League of the Just: “All men are brothers.”
This recognised that in the actually existing capitalist society, every moral and political issue means something different to different classes.
More from this author
The left must avoid shouting ‘racist’ and explain that the socialist alternative would benefit all
Xenophobic hysteria over the statistically insignificant number of small-boat crossings deliberately conceals how capitalism manipulates population flows for profit — if we can explain that, we’ll beat the right, argues NICK WRIGHT
NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
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
