Like many working-class socialists, Blackburn ILPer Johnnie Duxbury left only a faint footprint on the historical record. Yet his life of brave activism and everyday kindness ‘enriches our understanding of socialist commitment’, argues ROGER SMALLEY....
GARY KENT recalls how some on the British left challenged orthodox thinking and pioneered an alternative approach to Northern Ireland that helped lay the political groundwork for the Good Friday Agreement....
Anyone from Northumberland or County Durham involved in the 1984 miners’ strike will know the name of Anne Suddick, who died in January aged 72. Anne was a founding member of Women Against Pit Closures, set up the Durham Miners’ Support Group, and coordinated the Northumberland and Durham Justice for Mineworkers Campaign. MARY STRATFORD...
With Washington in violent turmoil, Georgia’s historic result provides a model for rebuilding trust in a broken political system. But will Democrats heed the lessons? MARY FITZGERALD and AARON WHITE report from the United States....
MARIA GOULDING reviews Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other – an interwoven tale of diversity and race that has much to teach us about the need for tolerance in modern Britain. ...
When Eric Preston died on 20 September this year it not only brought to an end his long and active life in the struggle for socialism, but marked the passing of an era for the ILP too. Eric’s writing and thinking over more than 60 years of ILP membership was hugely influential, not only...
BARNABY MARDER of Socialists Against Antisemitism recalls the events that led to Labour being investigated by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, and considers what it must do now to restore the confidence of the Jewish community. ...
Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered in the run-up to the US election was a sobering and resonant experience, says MARIA GOULDING. It’s a story centred on a dilapidated old house, a powerful image for an American society struggling to overcome its legacy of lies, injustice and inequality....
Tenant activists in Stirling have been inspiring fellow students across Scotland to fight back against rip-off landlords and university rent rises. CIAN IRELAND and DANIEL DEERY report on 18 months of hard campaigning....
WILL BROWN reviews a fascinating and timely examination of the sources of anticolonial opinion in Britain, one that reinforces the importance of new and more honest accounts of Britain’s imperial past....
DAVID CONNOLLY reviews the Labour leadership’s response to recent controversies at the Proms and with the Overseas Operations Bill and wonders whether Keir Starmer is trying to ride two horses at the same time....
MARIA GOULDING reflects on Ali Smith’s recently completed series of seasonal novels, an interwoven quartet written and published each year since the Brexit referendum. They are, she says, ‘both enjoyable and serious novels for our times’....