BEN CHACKO reports on fears at TUC Congress that the provisions in the legislation are liable to be watered down even further

THE right to demonstrate was hard-won. It took a massacre at Peterloo in Manchester on August 16 1819, where soldiers on horseback cut down, killed and injured protesters who were demanding the right to vote, to remind that state that allowing political demonstrations was perhaps preferable to such confrontations.
It is a right that has required exercise in practice down the decades and centuries — and there have of course been times when demonstrations were banned or attacked by the police.
Since the 1960s protest marches have become a significant way of focusing on issues which official Westminster politics ignores.

KEITH FLETT revisits debates about the name and structure of proposed working-class parties in the past

The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT

KEITH FLETT looks at the long history of coercion in British employment laws

The government cracking down on something it can’t comprehend and doesn’t want to engage with is a repeating pattern of history, says KEITH FLETT