Danni Perry’s flag display at the Royal Opera House sparked 182 performers to sign a solidarity letter that cancelled the Tel Aviv Tosca production, while Leonardo DiCaprio invests in Tel Aviv hotels, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Smile and be a villain
British satire may be instinctively anti-Tory, but with Jeremy Hardy’s death we lost one of the few prepared to stand up for Corbyn’s Labour Party, writes SAM WHEELER
Jeremy Hardy reading the names of Iraq War victims at a Stop the War Coalition rally in 2016
YANA PETTICREW explains what’s behind the strike and how the entire sector rests on super-exploiting an unorganised workforce
STEPHEN ARNELL casts a critical eye over the sudden rash of challenges to the two-party system on both sides of the Atlantic, noting that today’s performative populist politics sadly lacks Roosevelt’s progressive ‘Bull Moose’ vision of the early 20th century
BILL KIDD MSP says increasing Britain’s nuclear arsenal at this time is dangerous and expensive folly
ROGER McKENZIE asks whether the US’s shift to targeting everyone at once will instil greater co-operation among rising powers
THE death of Jeremy Hardy last week left two worlds, that of satire and that of the political left in Britain, far poorer. It seems a useful moment to reflect on the shift in where those worlds cross over in the last two decades.
Fifteen years ago I did my GCSE English coursework on Hardy’s documentary, “Jeremy Hardy vs the Israeli Army,” and in my head he remains a part of those years, at the beginning of the century, when so many of my generation were working out their politics to a backdrop of the “war on terror.”
His own frenetic revulsion at the injustices he saw around him fit with the time. Above all I remember a range of voices from comedy that challenged the powerful; the superbly crafted dialogues of John Bird and John Fortune, the sleazy, surreal darkness of Monkeydust, the raw anger sheathed in sarcasm of Charlie Brooker (before he got his happily ever after).
More from this author
SAM WHEELER applauds a visceral, thoughtful interrogation of radicalisation and national identity in contemporary Britain
Councillor SAM WHEELER, recently re-elected, speaks to the people of the rapidly changing heart of his home city
Councillor SAM WHEELER spoke to the person responsible for the graffiti slogan that went viral about poverty under Covid-19, Tory iniquity and the legacy of austerity
Manchester remains a Labour bastion, but there are forces stirring beneath the party's formidable machine, writes SAM WHEELER
