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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Bombs and Blairites - the continuing adventures of New Labour's old boys
SOLOMON HUGHES reports on the reappearance of Peter Mandelson and the arms company former defence minister Geoff Hoon would like you to forget
Peter Mandelson
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
PROGRESS, the Blairite faction inside the Labour Party, has a new financial backer — Peter Mandelson.
Progress has been New Labour’s shock troops since its foundation in 1996, but its members and supportive MPs have become marginalised since Jeremy Corbyn’s rise.
Last year their former “sugar daddy” Lord Sainsbury announced he was stopping his regular donations of £260,000 a year, so it has been looking for new financial backers.
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Our political sphere, stripped of its popular component by decades of neoliberalism, sits apart from the public, writes COLL MCCAIL citing a telling parallel with the writings of French revolutionary Abbe Sieyes
Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
US General Stanley McChrystal has been invited to advise on creating a ‘team of teams’ for healthcare transformation. His credentials? He previously ran interrogation bases where Iraqis were stripped naked and beaten, reports SOLOMON HUGHES