Seventeen years after losing her council job due to needing endometriosis surgery, Michelle Dewar’s campaign for paid menstrual leave gained 50,000 signatures in a week, reports ELIZABETH SHORT
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Echoes of Robeson with creative fire
Chris Searle on Jazz
From 35,000 troops in Talisman Sabre war games to HMS Spey provocations in the Taiwan Strait, Labour continues Tory militarisation — all while claiming to uphold ‘one China’ diplomatic agreements from 1972, reports KENNY COYLE
White racist rioting has many an infamous precedent in Britain, writes DAVID HORSLEY
The SNP might dissemble over the meaning of ‘nationalism,’ but it can’t disguise the fact that it is no left-wing party, says ELAINE SMITH
Castro became one of the first leaders to denounce Israeli genocide against Palestinians at the UN, comparing zionist persecution to Nazi crimes while Cuba trained PLO cadres and awarded Arafat state honours, writes PABLO MERIGUET
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
Eric Reed
Groovewise
(Smoke)
IN MAY 1952 and again in August 1958, the great singer, actor and cultural militant Paul Robeson, having been denied a passport by his own US government and confined within the boundaries of the world’s most powerful imperial nation, gave historic concerts on the back of a flat-bed truck in Blaine, Washington state, under the Peace Arch, a few feet from the Canadian border.
He sang across the US/British Columbia frontier which he was forbidden to cross, to 40,000 US and Canadian citizens in a unique and defiant performance of international solidarity.
I thought of these momentous events and Robeson singing Joe Hill, No More Auction Block or Ol’ Man River as I listened to the first very evocative track, Powerful Paul Robeson on the live album by the Philadelphia-born (in 1970) pianist Eric Reed and his quartet, recorded at New York’s Smoke Jazz Club in 2014, and called Groovewise.
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