Scottish Labour's leaders cannot keep blaming Westminster for the collapse at the ballot box, says VINCE MILLS
Latest editorial
The Starmer-Savile smear is indeed a smear
You don't need to be a Labour loyalist to say Starmer wasn't soft on sex crimes — but neither is it a rumour of murky, far-right origins: it's from the mainstream media, despite their current contrived outrage, explains SOLOMON HUGHES
Starmer was not directly involved in the decision not to prosecute Savile and led the DPP in a more or less conventional way — all the establishment organisations, including the DPP and the BBC, found it hard to pursue Savile, because they are biased towards the rich and powerful and against women, especially those with less money or social standing
Over 30 years since apartheid was abolished, nasty anti-migrant rhetoric sweeps the corporate media. The Commnunist Party is ready to fight back, says ROGER McKENZIE
Over 100,000 people are expected on Brussels’s streets today. Ben Chacko speaks to Belgian Workers Party’s PETER MERTENS on wage and pensions attacks that have united the fightback
FRED BAYER says the cuts to the congress cycle could be disastrous for the Scottish trade union movement
Berlin’s Soviet war memorials are becoming the latest front in a political struggle to ‘de-Sovietise’ German history. NICO POPP reports
Western Marxism is a particular version of Marxist theory developed in – and acceptable to – the capitalist nations of Europe and North America and largely divorced from political action, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
FRENCH NOVELIST George Perec wrote the novel A Void which doesn’t have a single letter “e” on any of its 290 pages. Gilbert Adair managed the fiendish task of translating it into English in 1995. Perec was a member of Oulipo, a loose collective of tricksters and the joke is a kind of extended prank, a deliberate piece of absurdity.
I raise A Void now because the extended absurdity of writing a novel without the letter “e” reminds me of a bizarre void inside British journalism. A Void is quite impressive and funny to read, but it is also sort of annoying, because all the characters keep saying things like “a thing I cannot pinpoint is missing from our linguistics” — and your mind keeps saying, “Yes! The letter E is missing! Will you just stop messing about and notice it!”
When it comes to journalism, what is missing is something equally basic: any description or acknowledgement of journalism itself. The media can look at politics going rotten but can never see the media’s role in it.
Similar stories
Gisele Pelicot said ‘shame must change sides.’ We may think we agree, but, argues LOUISE RAW, society still has some way to go
As the PM and his chief of staff’s blunders have mounted up, ANDREW MURRAY wonders who among Labour’s diminished ‘soft left’ might make a bid for the leadership
While Reform poses as a workers’ party, a credible left alternative rooted in working-class communities would expose their sham — and Corbyn’s stature will be crucial to its appeal, argues CHELLEY RYAN
MARTIN HALL passes time in the sanguine company of a traditional conservative, recalling their disastrous governments