RAMZY BAROUD on how Israel’s narrative collides with military failure
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Is it new party time?
VINCE MILLS gathers some sobering facts that would inevitably be major obstacles to any such initiative
SOBERING FIGURES: Vote counting for the Runcorn and Helsby by-election on May 1 2025
ROGER McKENZIE explains how Ibrahim Traore has sparked the flames of hope across Africa, while the Western powers seek to extinguish all attempts to build true sovereignty in the long-exploited continent
DANIEL GOVER considers the procedural complexities awaiting a Private Member’s Bill in its passage through Commons and Lords
JAMIE TUCKNUTT reports on an initiative that brings together two epochs of the city’s anti-fascist struggles
Just as German Social Democrats joined the Nazis in singing Deutschland Uber Alles, ANDREW MURRAY observes how Starmer tries to out-Farage Farage with anti-migrant policies — but evidence shows Reform voters come from Tories, not Labour, making this ploy morally bankrupt and politically pointless
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
With turnout plummeting and faith in Parliament collapsing, BERT SCHOUWENBURG explains how radical local government reform — including devolved taxation and removal of party politics from town halls — could restore power to communities currently ignored by profit-obsessed MPs
THE failure to act on the two-child benefit cap, the cuts to winter fuel payments, the muted response to the genocide in Gaza, increases in military expenditure — these and many more failures ensured that the recent electoral results for Labour were a disaster.
They also ensured that the call for an electoral left alternative to the Labour Party would become more insistent. The reason is that unlike the recent history of such calls, which tend to be in response to a reactionary shift by the Labour Party, or at least its leadership — think the invasion of Iraq — we now have to deal with an even more reactionary response to Labour’s rightward shuffle: the Reform Party.
Here is the formidable Claudia Webbe writing in this paper after the elections: “...the results were grim, not because of the losses of Labour and the Tories, whose political bankruptcy was rightly punished, but because that political bankruptcy has gifted such a surge to the extreme right... we are where we are and the sole encouragement of last week is that it made the need for left politics clearer than ever, for those willing to look. We need a new left political party.”
More from this author
That Scotland was an active participant and beneficiary of colonialism and slavery is not a question of blame games and guilt peddling, but a crucial fact assessing the class nature of the questions of devolution and independence, writes VINCE MILLS
While VINCE MILLS laments the resignation of Neil Findlay from Scottish Labour, he explains why he won’t be joining him outside the party in the ongoing struggle for a socialist future
The EU and Nato are umbilically tied – but what will the new Trump era and a reconfiguration of US interests mean for the war in Ukraine, asks VINCE MILLS
As polls show Scottish Labour’s support crumbling and Reform rising even among independence supporters, an urgent need emerges for an alternative based on public investment paid for by radical progressive taxation, argues VINCE MILLS
