Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
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Why I have nailed my colours to the EU mast
NICK MATTHEWS believes that progressives throughout the continent can and will, given time, change the political and economic deficits at the heart of the Union
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
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NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
Umberto Eco, the great Italian semioticist, died in the same week as Terry Wogan. Wogan, bless him, taught us to laugh at the Eurovision song contest — that overblown camp extravaganza in all its glorious absurdity.
If we had been listening to Eco he could have taught us something far more important — he could have helped us to decipher the absurd language around the current debate on our membership of the European Union.
In his last book of essays titled Inventing the Enemy he implies that every country, every people need an external enemy to unite them and give them a sense of who they are by defining who they are not.
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SEVIM DAGDELEN asks why the European Union is targeting the Swiss academic Jacques Baud, cutting off his access to banking services
From summit to summit, imperialist companies and governments cut, delay or water down their commitments, warn the Communist Parties of Britain, France, Portugal and Spain and the Workers Party of Belgium in a joint statement on Cop30
MARTIN HALL welcomes a study of Britain’s relationship with the EU that sheds light on the way euroscepticism moved from the margins to the centre
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