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
Latest editorial
The South African billionaires fomenting a global race war
From their apartheid-era childhoods to Trump’s inner circle, billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel bring a colonial ‘divide and rule’ mindset to the global far-right project, where the masses turn on each other, writes JOE GILL
Elon Musk speaks at Life Centre Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on October 19, 2024
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
THERE is a common origin story to the new far-right billionaire backers of Donald Trump: apartheid South Africa.
Both Elon Musk and Peter Thiel — the biggest tech billionaires backing Trump — grew up there, where their fathers grew rich, respectively, mining diamonds and uranium — sectors at the core of the apartheid economy.
“The centrality of South Africa for the far right and for neoliberals is quite extraordinary,” said Boston University’s Professor Quinn Slobodian in a recent interview. “For Musk himself the experience of growing up there with a very authoritarian dictatorial father was a very dystopian one, from the way his biographer recounts it.”
Similar stories
Politicians who continue to welcome contracts with US companies without considering the risks and consequences of total dependency in the years to come are undermining the raison d’etre of the NHS, argues Dr JOHN PUNTIS
ALAN SIMPSON warns of a dystopian crossroads where Trump’s wrecking ball meets AI-driven alienation, and argues only a Green New Deal can repair our fractured society before techno-feudalism consumes us all
That should be warning enough to end the company’s contract with the NHS, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
STEPHEN ARNELL sees parallels between the US tech billionaire and HG Wells’s literary creation