SOLOMON HUGHES uncovers government documents showing hidden dinners and meetings between Labour figures and disgraced Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm, which collapsed after links to Epstein and sleazy influence operations came to light
IT IS a common myth that there is widespread public support for the wars and military interventions which have marked the history of the British empire and which are a continuing hallmark of imperialism.
Yet there has always been a strong current of anti-war opinion in Britain and it reached its height in the early part of this century when millions marched against the Iraq war and helped to create a massive crisis in Tony Blair’s government, the legacy of which still weighs like a nightmare on the present-day Labour Party.
The success of Jeremy Corbyn in winning Labour’s leadership in 2015 is attributed in part to the continued opposition to that war among many in the trade union and labour movement and the sense that there had to be a reckoning about Blair’s wars.
BEN CHACKO says in different ways, the centenary of the General Strike and that of Fidel Castro’s birth point to priority tasks for the British left in the coming year
Starmer sabotaged Labour with his second referendum campaign, mobilising a liberal backlash that sincerely felt progressive ideals were at stake — but the EU was then and is now an entity Britain should have nothing to do with, explains NICK WRIGHT
While Hardie, MacDonald and Wilson faced down war pressure from their own Establishment, today’s leadership appears to have forgotten that opposing imperial adventures has historically defined Labour’s moral authority, writes KEITH FLETT



