HENRY FOWLER, assistant general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU), reports on Day 2 from the GFTU’s residential Summer School at the Workers’ Retreat, Quorn Grange Hotel
I FIRST met Gareth Miles during a Plaid Cymru conference in the mid-1970s, in Tenby or Aberystwyth if I remember correctly.
He had just contributed to a debate about what the foreign and defence policy of a Plaid Cymru government should be, in an independent Wales. Rod Barrar’s suggestion was that a truly sovereign Wales should join the Warsaw Pact!
In Gareth’s opinion, he told me at the time, this standpoint was too extreme, even though the majority of Plaid Cymru members — as today in all likelihood — supported the principle of neutrality, outside Nato.
MEIC BIRTWISTLE offers an appreciation of the renaissance man GARETH MILES
JOHN CALLOW examines what went wrong for the Czech communist party in the recent parliamentary elections, where it failed to meet the threshold to return deputies and some now talk of the party abandoning its commitment to socialism
CLIVE HASWELL introduces the latest edition of Cardiff’s left-wing conference, which will take a broad and non-sectarian approach to who the left should vote for, welcoming approaches from all major progressive parties that hope to transform the world
In the run-up to the Communist Party congress in November ROB GRIFFITHS outlines a few ideas regarding its participation in the elections of May 2026


