GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
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Hope lies with the grassroots
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds a timely reminder of a past victory, and its clear message that leadership is not to be found among the Labour right
More than 300 protesters demonstrate against the poll tax outside the magistrates' court in Warrington, Cheshire where the first of 5,000 people charged with non-payment of the tax was appearing.
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: A Short History of the Anti-Poll Tax Struggle 1987–1993
Chris Robinson, Thinkwell Books, £10
A LESSON for the Labour leadership lurks at the moral core of this timely history of the poll tax and the juggernaut of rebellion against it by working people.
Chris Robinson’s book reminds today’s leaders — and the wider labour movement — that the unjust, cynical “community charge” as it was euphemistically called was defeated on the streets, in parlours and in pubs, and not in Parliament.
The abject failure of the then Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, and his party’s cowardly siege of its own left wing in the miserably deluded hope that this would reward them at the ballot box comes across on every page.
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