Robinson successfully defended his school from closure, fought for the unification of the teaching unions, mentored future trade union leaders and transformed teaching at the Marx Memorial Library, writes JOHN FOSTER
John Wilkes: the perfect imperfect rebel leader
Despite his wealthy background and membership of a secretive aristocratic occult club, the radical politician forged an alliance with the working class to fight for democracy and free speech against the Georgian elite, writes MAT COWARD
TALK OF THE TOWN: (L to R) John Wilkes caricatured by William Hogarth, 1763; John Wilkes before the Court of King's Bench, engraving from The Gentleman's Magazine for May 1768
[Public Domain] 
A judge in a German court ruled that the ban activity imposed on renowned Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah was unlawful, reports LEON WYSTRYCHOWSKI
At the very moment Britain faces poverty, housing and climate crises requiring radical solutions, the liberal press promotes ideologically narrow books while marginalising authors who offer the most accurate understanding of change, writes IAN SINCLAIR
From Gaza protest bans to proscribing Palestine Action, political elites are showing a crisis of confidence as they abandon Roy Jenkins’s apologetic approach for Suella Braverman’s aggressive ‘hate march’ rhetoric, writes PAUL DONOVAN
ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the legal case behind this weekend’s Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival and the lessons for today
Ben Chacko talks to RMT leader EDDIE DEMPSEY about how the key to fixing broken Britain lies in collective sectoral bargaining, restoring unions’ ability to take solidarity strike action and bringing about the much-vaunted ‘wave of insourcing’
The summer of 1950 saw Labour abandon further nationalisation while escalating Korean War spending from £2.3m to £4.7m, as the government meekly accepted capitalism’s licence and became Washington’s yes-man, writes JOHN ELLISON
IF you were building a perfect rebel leader from a kit, I don’t think you’d end up with John Wilkes. You’d probably prefer someone who wasn’t a member of the orgiastic Hellfire Club, and who hadn’t been expelled from Parliament for writing a libellously pornographic poem. But there you go: history has its whims.
John Wilkes (1725-97) was and is famous for many reasons, not least his celebrated witticisms, which appear in quotation anthologies to this day. (Any reader who has spent time knocking on doors during elections will appreciate Wilkes’s reply to a constituent who told him he’d rather vote for the devil: “But if your friend decides not to stand?”).
For all the colourful gossip fodder with which his life was filled, however, there was one cause to which he stubbornly clung and which was, then and now, of fundamental democratic importance.
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