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
The Starmer project and the SDP: back to the 1980s
What is the Labour leader up to? It is not clear from his recent vague pronouncements — could the real goal not be winning an election, but creating the 1981 split in reverse, with the left forced into a rival party, asks KEITH FLETT
The first Social Democratic Party conference at the City Hall Perth in October 1981
Morning Star international editor ROGER McKENZIE says Trump’s ceaseless belligerence is a desperate effort to prevent the emergence of a multilateral world
Don’t dismiss Lebanon as a side theatre of this war, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN — there are signs Israel has expansion in mind, and it has demonstrated its willingness to expel and kill whole populations
The media present Starmer as staying out of Trump’s war — but we’re already deeply involved in a conflict that sees the US and Israel kill civilians on a huge scale, argues IAN SINCLAIR
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER reports on this week’s conference unveiling the findings of the Gaza Tribunal established by Jeremy Corbyn
CHRISTOPHE IMMER of the Morning Star’s German sister paper Junge Welt reports on a Berlin conference on the politics of art and the legacy of Marxist critic Hans Hess
KEIR STARMER has been active recently in defining what his project is. Luciana Berger, who quit Labour for the centrist Change UK party and then joined the Lib Dems has re-joined Labour — and others may follow.
Meanwhile, Starmer has been promoting his political missions, laid out in a speech and a New Statesman article. Although both were worthy enough in a general way, even the austere figure of Ed Balls noted that voters would want some more practical details about what Labour was actually going to do.
Starmer may be more popular than the Tories — but that popularity is lukewarm. A crowd chanted his name in central London recently at a protest against transphobia. “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chants were a familiar feature of the previous leader’s tenure. Unfortunately for Sir Keir, the recent chant was not a positive one.
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Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT
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
KEITH FLETT traces how the ‘world’s most successful political party’ has imploded since Thatcher’s fall, from nine leaders in 30 years to losing all 16 English councils, with Reform UK symbolically capturing Peel’s birthplace, Tamworth — but the beast is not dead yet
JOE GILL looks at research on the reasons people voted as they did last week and concludes Labour is finished unless it ditches Starmer and changes course