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
A party with a penchant for war and oppression
Genocide, racism and imperialism are in the Labour Party’s DNA, argues TOM SYKES
BLAIR’S WARS: A British soldier trains his rifle on a crowd in Basra during the invasion and occupation of Iraq, 2003
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
EVER since they came into government in July, Labour has been directly and indirectly supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its over 17,000 assaults on other Palestinian lands, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iran. According to Declassified UK, the RAF have flown 100 spy flights over Gaza since Keir Starmer became prime minister and his government refuses to publish footage taken on one such mission on the day three British aid workers were killed by an Israeli air strike.
Meanwhile, Labour’s ban on 30 out of 350 arms licences is largely symbolic, since the export continues of components for F-35 fighter jets, which have been used in multiple war crimes including attacks on hospitals, medical personnel and defenceless civilians. Fifteen NGOs, including Amnesty International and Oxfam, have called for the British government to halt these sales, ensure the protection of Palestinian civilians and comply with “the ICJ’s orders to prevent genocide.” The plea has been ignored.
Labour’s backing of violence against Palestinians goes back a lot further than Starmer’s summer election win. In 1929, Labour’s first-ever prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, responded to a general strike and wave of protests in Palestine — then under British colonial domination — by sending troops in to kill 200 and imprison hundreds more.
More from this author
TOM SYKES explores how art has critiqued politics from Aristotle to Brecht, as Portsmouth Performers for Palestine prepares to showcase poetry, fiction and music reflecting on genocide, dispossession and colonialism at the White Swan Theatre
A legal case at the ICJ has exposed the role of Indonesian arms sales that were crucial to enabling Myanmar to kill thousands of civilians, reports TOM SYKES
Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jnr has won, using a tech-savvy social media rewrite of his parents’ dictatorship and a troll army to smear his closest competitor — DR TOM SYKES reports on a society seemingly unable to leave its own dark age
TOM SYKES went to Jaywick in Essex last summer and kept a diary. Here is an extract illustrated by his companion on that journey Louis Netter
