As food and fuel run out, Gaza’s doctors appeal to the world to end the ‘genocide of children,’ reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Victor Alan Heath 1932-2025
Mark Harvey pays tribute to a veteran of the days when the London building trade was a hotbed of working-class struggle, a legendary trade unionist, communist and poet
Victor Alan Heath
While Trump threatens to send Haitian gang leaders to El Salvador's terror prison, DANNY SHAW reveals how these paramilitary groups are merely symptoms of US-backed neocolonial rule — the real terrorists are the CIA and international actors arming desperate youth to traumatise an unarmed population
Having endured 14 years of Tory austerity followed by Starmerite cuts, young voters are desperate for change — but Anas Sarwar’s refusal to differentiate from Westminster means Scottish Labour risks electoral catastrophe, writes LAUREN HARPER
Rather than hoping for the emergence of some new ‘party of the left,’ EMMA DENT COAD sees a broad alliance of local parties and community groups as a way of reviving democratic progressive politics
ANSELM ELDERGILL draws attention to a legal case on Tuesday in which a human rights group is challenging the government’s decision to allow the sale of weapons used against Palestinians
The obfuscation of Nazism’s capitalist roots has seen imperialism redeploy fascism again and again — from the killing fields of Guatemala to the war in Ukraine, writes PAWEL WARGAN
From Workers’ Memorial Day to May Day rallies, TOM MORRISON examines the real challenges facing the labour movement as Reform UK’s glossy literature exploits legitimate grievances in traditional left strongholds
VICTOR ALAN HEATH died on Saturday April 26 2025 while in hospital. He was a truly remarkable person and will be sorely missed by his wife, Vera, his family and friends. A lifelong committed trade unionist, his life shaped, and was shaped by, the history of our times.
Vic was born in 1932, the sixth of seven brothers and an older sister, living in an industrial area of Camden Town, London. When war broke out, the three younger brothers and their sister were evacuated to a small rural farming village, where Vic acquired a love for nature that lasted for the rest of his life. His three eldest brothers served in the armed forces and survived, but the next eldest died in an accident assisting the fire brigade during the bombing of London.
He left school at 13, an option then, and went to work in a carpentry firm with his elder brother, Fred, who had just demobbed after the war. There, he encountered Hugo, a Hungarian communist, who initiated Vic into his passion for socialism and concern for world affairs, reading the Daily Worker/Morning Star for the rest of his life. Vic later joined the Communist Party.
More from this author
MARK HARVEY of the Institute of Employment Rights argues that Britain has walked into a perfect storm due to employers forcing workers to register as self employed — with no responsibility toward them in times like the present crisis
Similar stories
Incredibly, US Republican states are systematically dismantling child labour protections, with children transformed back into the cheap, disposable workers of the Dickens era, reports ANDREW MURRAY
MARY CONWAY admires an accomplished drama that explores the consequences of a fatal punch on a desolate housing estate
SIMON PARSONS is swept away on the running tide of a dynamic new version of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale
PAUL DONOVAN applauds the dogged determination of the Old Vic to stage Dickens’s classic Christmas moral tale in support of Waterloo food bank