Danni Perry’s flag display at the Royal Opera House sparked 182 performers to sign a solidarity letter that cancelled the Tel Aviv Tosca production, while Leonardo DiCaprio invests in Tel Aviv hotels, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Manchester is red
Manchester remains a Labour bastion, but there are forces stirring beneath the party's formidable machine, writes SAM WHEELER
YANA PETTICREW explains what’s behind the strike and how the entire sector rests on super-exploiting an unorganised workforce
STEPHEN ARNELL casts a critical eye over the sudden rash of challenges to the two-party system on both sides of the Atlantic, noting that today’s performative populist politics sadly lacks Roosevelt’s progressive ‘Bull Moose’ vision of the early 20th century
BILL KIDD MSP says increasing Britain’s nuclear arsenal at this time is dangerous and expensive folly
ROGER McKENZIE asks whether the US’s shift to targeting everyone at once will instil greater co-operation among rising powers
MANCHESTER remained the largest Labour group in the country last week, with 93 of 96 seats. Even on a rather poor night for the party nationally, the Liberals were confined to a single ward. That was West Didsbury, successor to the Didsbury Ward of Manchester’s last elected Tory councillor, Peter Hilton, who finally left the town hall in 1996.
Even more worrying perhaps for those that imagine a Liberal revival in the city of Bright and Cobden, they only came second in a further seven wards. Rather, it was the Manchester Green Party who were runners up in 13 of the city’s 32 wards despite having almost none of the campaign architecture of the other parties.
Further, the closest margin of the night came not from Manchester’s erstwhile opposition, but from Independent Ken Dobson in the staunchly working class Clayton & Openshaw division, where he ran Labour’s Sean McHale within a dozen votes.
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