The Labour leadership’s narrow definition of ‘working people’ leads to distorted and unjust Budget calculations, where the unearned income of the super-wealthy doesn’t factor in at all, argues JON TRICKETT MP
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Remembering John Smith
The late John Smith, pictured in 1993
Brazilian workers are calling for internationalist brigades to defend Venezuela from US attack, reports WT WHITNEY JR
KEITH FLETT recalls ‘the most advanced political programme to appear on the left until the time of the Bolsheviks’
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY ask how an 80-tonne whale that lives 200 years is so resistant to cancer
Sixty years of blockade have not made Cuba collapse, but they have devastated it. While Washington stands isolated at the United Nations, the Cuban people are paying the price, writes KATRIEN DEMUYNCK
As Armistice Day approaches, with the far right hoping to use it to promote their own form of ‘patriotism,’ NICK WRIGHT considers the nature of conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries and the different ways they should be remembered
ON SUNDAY many will be remembering the late Labour leader John Smith, 25 years on from his death. In a counterfactual history (as part of The Prime Ministers Who Never Were, Biteback, 2011), the writer and journalist Francis Beckett imagined if he had instead recovered from his heart attack.
In this fantasy, “Smith was happy, after September 11 2001, to send British troops to Afghanistan, but he drew the line at committing himself to war in Iraq, and made common cause with the French.”
Tony Blair never rose further than education secretary — and Gordon Brown’s hopes were thwarted by his “old nemesis Ken Livingstone, to whose 10-year occupancy of No 10 we owe, among much else, our pedestrianised city centres.”
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The British press has welcomed Keir Starmer’s new National Security Adviser without any mention of his deep, central involvement in the criminal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan — but history remembers, writes IAN SINCLAIR