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
AS Boris Johnson knows all too well, insecurity is the handmaiden of authoritarianism. Create it and you erode public confidence in an array of democratic rights painfully fought for over centuries.
So it is now. Under the cloak of Covid insecurity, Brexit cock-up, climate crises and supply bottlenecks, Johnson’s government is rolling back the frontiers of democracy at an alarming rate. The libertarian right rails against having to wear masks on public transport and in shops, but says nothing about greater liberties they would gleefully remove in the grotesque Policing Bill.
The press seem happy to aid and abet this process, more enthusiastically chasing stories about the anti-mask “party” antics rather than anti-democratic ones. There is, however, an important link between the two. It is the conflict between the politics of individualism and collectivism; encapsulated, paradoxically, by the brothers Corbyn.
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
As the dollar falters and US power turns predatory, Britain and Europe must abandon transatlantic illusions and build a collectivist alternative before the system implodes, writes ALAN SIMPSON
The collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation poses an existential threat — but do today’s politicians have the capacity to deliver the more resilient and sustainable economics of tomorrow, wonders ALAN SIMPSON
ALAN SIMPSON warns of a dystopian crossroads where Trump’s wrecking ball meets AI-driven alienation, and argues only a Green New Deal can repair our fractured society before techno-feudalism consumes us all



