SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
ELON MUSK, who claims to be the world’s richest man (and also probably the most indebted one), has bought the social media giant Twitter.
In doing so, he has sacked, often illegally, thousands of Twitter employees, and raised the question of whether it will continue at all.
As often with capitalism, appearance and reality differ. Twitter is a free-to-use platform for anyone to raise and discuss more or less anything, with limited constraints. That means it has numbers of racists and fascists using it, but also significant use by those from marginalised areas of society that the mainstream media reliably ignores.
It’s not just the Starmer regime: the workers of Britain have always faced legal affronts on their right to assemble and dissent, and the Labour Party especially has meddled with our freedoms from its earliest days, writes KEITH FLETT
Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT
Research shows Farage mainly gets rebel voters from the Tory base and Labour loses voters to the Greens and Lib Dems — but this doesn’t mean the danger from the right isn’t real, explains historian KEITH FLETT
KEITH FLETT traces how the ‘world’s most successful political party’ has imploded since Thatcher’s fall, from nine leaders in 30 years to losing all 16 English councils, with Reform UK symbolically capturing Peel’s birthplace, Tamworth — but the beast is not dead yet



