TUC general secretary PAUL NOWAK speaks to the Morning Star’s Berny Torre about the increasing frustration the trade union movement feels at a government that promised change, but has been too slow to bring it about
Britain’s political landscape is being redrawn by an insurgent right
In the first of two pieces, NICK WRIGHT examines the rise of Reform UK and its parallels with France’s National Rally, warning of the dangers that lie ahead for a left without convincing answers to rising anti-immigration sentiment
GAINING GROUND: Reform UK MPs Nigel Farage (left) and Lee Anderson
DIANE ABBOTT exposes the misconceptions, rumours and downright lies perpetrated around immigration issues
With 12,000 fewer teachers since 2010 and dwindling resources, Scotland’s schools desperately need investment to support diverse learners rather than empty promises from politicians, writes ANDREA BRADLEY
Reversing outsourcing is the pre-election promise the government must honour, says Unison general secretary CHRISTINA McANEA
EMAN ABU ZAYED reminisces about the perilous time her family and neighbours endured in northern Gaza and how they were forced, in fear of their lives, to flee south
The EIS president who defended Marxist politics in the 1980s fought Thatcherite educational policies while organising Teachers for Peace rallies and ensuring Morning Star circulation in Scotland’s pit villages and factories, writes JOHN FOSTER
BRITAIN’S electoral map has changed with a significant shift in the voting behaviour of both the working class and the middle class.
The archaic disposition of seats in the Westminster Parliament — with His Majesty’s loyal ministers seated on one side of the chamber and His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition on the opposite benches draws on the liturgical traditions of the Christian church and formalises a now redundant disposition of political forces.
The greater diversity of political tendencies now present in Parliament — even though the deeply undemocratic FPTP system still distorts the real relations between the contending forces — would be better represented by the adoption of the republican model of a parliament, like the French and Scottish assemblies.
There the people’s representatives sit in an arc modelled on the epic theatre of classical antiquity which, in the modern era, reveals more clearly the distinctions between the new alignments of the reactionary right and hints at a new popular left constellation.
We should make the grotesque Palace of Westminster even more of a museum of oddities and build a new parliament of the people wherever HS2 eventually terminates.
* * *
Within politics, the tectonic plates are shifting and we need to devise a strategy that puts the working class at the centre of political progress on its own account while taking account of the newly salient fact that voting behaviour is far more complex than is accounted for by Westminster’s archaic geometry.
The Communist Party’s election co-ordinator Phil Katz reports that voters often agreed with the party’s economic policies but, on a variety of issues, thought a vote for Reform UK expressed their opinions.
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