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
EUROPE is being called the epicentre of the coronavirus, and particularly western Europe, where the responses have varied from the new Socialist-Podemos coalition in Spain nationalising the country’s industry to a total quarantine in France by the neoliberal Emmanuel Macron, criticised for being three weeks too late.
There is a kind of constant tension between whether xenophobic nationalist solutions to the problem will reign, where the predominant way of fighting the disease that US President Donald Trump labelled a “foreign” virus is to close borders: or whether the European Union will come together to combine its forces to fight this battle.
There is controversy also about the origins of the virus, with one Chinese official claiming that the virus was manufactured in US army labs and could have been delivered to its first point of outbreak in Wuhan province by the US delegation to the Military World Games, held just weeks before the outbreak.
US tariffs have had Von der Leyen bowing in submission, while comments from the former European Central Bank leader call for more European political integration and less individual state sovereignty. All this adds up to more pain and austerity ahead, argues NICK WRIGHT
In the first half of a two-part article, PETER MERTENS looks at how Nato’s €800 billion ‘Readiness 2030’ plan serves Washington’s pivot to the Pacific, forcing Europeans to dismantle social security and slash pensions to fund it



