SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
WE have become accustomed to the phenomenon by which the literary labour of Paul Mason, with the inevitability of a natural process, gives rise to its own negation.
After acquiring an enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party the lapsed Trotskyite — reacting to the disruption of a Labour rally by pro-EU elements — tweeted: “I am sick of these astroturf elitists … it’s all prep for a millionaire funded ‘centrist party’ that will unleash illegal wars, benefit cuts and drive wages to the bottom.”
Months later he was arguing in the New Statesman for a second EU referendum just as the millionaire-funded Change UK centrist party was created precisely to facilitate that very thing.
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
From Gaza complicity to welfare cuts chaos, Starmer’s baggage accumulates, and voters will indeed find ‘somewhere else’ to go — to the Greens, nationalists, Lib Dems, Reform UK or a new, working-class left party, writes NICK WRIGHT
There is no doubt that Trump’s regime is a right-wing one, but the clash between the state apparatus and the national and local government is a good example of what any future left-wing formation will face here in Britain, writes NICK WRIGHT



