As tens of thousands return to the streets for the first national Palestine march of 2026, this movement refuses to be sidelined or silenced, says PETER LEARY
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The Spycops inquiry: a window on the sinister side of the British state
With undercover policing under the spotlight, these operations will continue with extra efforts to hide them from public scrutiny writes NICK WRIGHT
Students marching in memory of Kevin Gately in 1974
If the government really wanted to address public finances, improve living standards and begin economic recovery, it would increase its borrowing for investment, argues MICHAEL BURKE
MATT KERR takes a winter journey through poetry, labour and memory, from Glasgow to Newcastle, arguing that our radical past isn’t something to revere from a distance, but a tool still meant to be used
One of Canada’s most revered politicians is a native of Falkirk but is relatively unknown in his original homeland. KENNY MacASKILL tells his story
Labour prospects in May elections may be irrevocably damaged by Birmingham Council’s costly refusal to settle the year-long dispute, warns STEVE WRIGHT
HENRY FOWLER and ROB POOLE explain the significance of today’s Megapicket
THE Spycops inquiry, more properly the Undercover Policing Inquiry, continues to let slip an occasional nugget from the mountainous, if heavily redacted, pile of documents introduced into evidence.
The focus of the inquiry is the investigation of a long period of undercover infiltration into more than a thousand political groups.
The starting date is 1968 and the attention is on two Metropolitan Police units, the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). This reflects one aspect of the secret state’s anxieties as the post-war period of growth began to falter while the freeze on politics that the cold war imposed was beginning to melt.
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Ways of opposing the increasingly repressive measures from the British state against protesters will be discussed at the Arise Festival. BEN HAYES reports