Gaza’s collective sumud has proven more powerful than one of the world’s best-equipped militaries, but the change in international attitudes isn’t happening fast enough to save a starving population from Western-backed genocide, argues RAMZY BAROUD
Smile and be a villain
British satire may be instinctively anti-Tory, but with Jeremy Hardy’s death we lost one of the few prepared to stand up for Corbyn’s Labour Party, writes SAM WHEELER
Jeremy Hardy reading the names of Iraq War victims at a Stop the War Coalition rally in 2016
Starmer sabotaged Labour with his second referendum campaign, mobilising a liberal backlash that sincerely felt progressive ideals were at stake — but the EU was then and is now an entity Britain should have nothing to do with, explains NICK WRIGHT
JOHN PERRY, BECCA RENK and ROGER D HARRIS offer a corrective to the idea that Latin America still lags far behind the West on women’s rights by looking at the region’s significant feminist gains now stretching back decades
Danni Perry’s flag display at the Royal Opera House sparked 182 performers to sign a solidarity letter that cancelled the Tel Aviv Tosca production, while Leonardo DiCaprio invests in Tel Aviv hotels, reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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
STEPHEN ARNELL casts a critical eye over the sudden rash of challenges to the two-party system on both sides of the Atlantic, noting that today’s performative populist politics sadly lacks Roosevelt’s progressive ‘Bull Moose’ vision of the early 20th century
THE death of Jeremy Hardy last week left two worlds, that of satire and that of the political left in Britain, far poorer. It seems a useful moment to reflect on the shift in where those worlds cross over in the last two decades.
Fifteen years ago I did my GCSE English coursework on Hardy’s documentary, “Jeremy Hardy vs the Israeli Army,” and in my head he remains a part of those years, at the beginning of the century, when so many of my generation were working out their politics to a backdrop of the “war on terror.”
His own frenetic revulsion at the injustices he saw around him fit with the time. Above all I remember a range of voices from comedy that challenged the powerful; the superbly crafted dialogues of John Bird and John Fortune, the sleazy, surreal darkness of Monkeydust, the raw anger sheathed in sarcasm of Charlie Brooker (before he got his happily ever after).
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