The Tories introduced the 50% strike ballot threshold to make industrial action harder. MATT WRACK argues that a Labour government has no justification for leaving it on the statute book
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Sounds of Iraq and beyond
Chris Searle on jazz
In the wake of Ann Widdecombe’s murder, JOHN GREEN wonders whether the government will really get to grips with the root cause of these attacks on our MPs
The new PM’s opening addresses offered hope, council homes and reform — but little detail on how any of it will be delivered, warns CLAUDIA WEBBE
Despite the screeching from the right-wing media, Burnham’s speech chimed with the public mood - and socialists should take advantage, says Morning Star editor BEN CHACKO
Scotland's Labour leader cannot continue to evade responsibility for the party's decline, argues LAUREN HARPER
Nature as well as society works dialectically, asserts the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School
Amir ElSaffar
Crisis
(PI Recordings)
“OUT of the ashes emerges a sound. Overtones, harmonising, becoming many. Intangible threads of humanity, too delicate to be broken or destroyed, emanating from a shared, infinite past that is our present.”
Such is the description by the Iraqi-American trumpeter born and raised in Chicago, Amir ElSaffar, of his Crisis Suite, composed in 2013 following a year living in Egypt and Lebanon with Syrian musicians who had been in the heart of civil conflict and destruction, and first performed at the 2013 Newport Jazz Festival.
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