BEN CHACKO reports on fears at TUC Congress that the provisions in the legislation are liable to be watered down even further
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Commemorating the Newport Rising of November 4, 1839
Today marks 184 years since the greatest armed rebellion in 19th-century Britain when Chartist workers fought bloody gun battles with the police and army in the heart of industrial Wales, writes STEPHEN ARNELL
A sketch of the huge crowd in Newport in 1839 as it surrounded the Westgate Hotel hoping to free captive Chartist comrades (via the People’s History Museum).
CHRIS HOOFE calls for support for GMB’s Potters’ Pledge campaign, aimed at making sure the historic pottery industry based in Stoke-on-Trent is supported over cheap, low-quality imports and counterfeits
Investing the £75 billion slated for defence spending on a green new deal, healthcare and education would create jobs and help communities far more than weapons spending, argues UCU general secretary JO GRADY
Speaking to the Morning Star’s Ceren Sagir, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists LAURA DAVISON outlines the threats to journalism from Palestine to Britain, and the unique challenges confronting the industry through the rise of AI
We must organise broad-based counterprotests and celebratory local community events to rebuild class consciousness and challenge the far-right’s divisive lies, writes KEVIN COURTNEY, ahead of this Saturday’s big demo in London
Artists should not be consigned to a life of precarious working – they deserve dignity and proper workers’ rights, argues ZITA HOLBOURNE
“Come hail brothers, hail the shrill sound of the horn
For ages deep wrongs have been hopelessly borne
Despair shall no longer our spirits dismay
Nor wither the arms when upraised for the fray;
The conflict for freedom is gathering nigh:
We live to secure it, or gloriously die.”
— Chartist song of the South Wales miners
UNLIKE our friends across the channel in France, the inhabitants of Britain appear a remarkably supine people in the main, usually preferring well-organised demonstrations to anything that whiffs of pre-planned armed revolt, no matter how righteous the cause.
Yes, there have been mass meetings, marches and spontaneous events that took a wrong turn and descended into riots, but we seem singularly ill-equipped by nature to contemplate anything more serious.
But this would be doing this island race a disservice; to paraphrase the emperor Tiberius, there was a time when the British were not a people “fit to be slaves.”
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