HEROES

John Pilger

On Saturday the world lost one of its most courageous journalistic voices, as the veteran reporter and film-maker died in London. Pilger’s fearless war reporting made him a passionate opponent of Western imperialist foreign policy, and his integrity got him into trouble with editors and newspaper barons throughout his career: but he never bent the knee, producing devastating indictments of the lies and hypocrisy of our rulers to the end. 

Among the most significant in recent years, The Coming War on China (2016) is a chilling forecast of a US-led drive to world war that has only accelerated since, while 2019’s The Dirty War on the National Health Service exposes the under-the-radar privatisation project that is sadly set to continue whoever is elected this year.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign, CND & Stop the War

These three campaigns have sprung into action since Israel launched its murderous invasion of Gaza in October following the deadly Hamas attacks on its territory, working together alongside others to organise mammoth demos in London as well as marches, rallies and vigils right across Britain. 

The ruling class has had them in its sights: the Tories are pursuing bans on Palestine solidarity activism at universities, including a ban on the Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement, while Stop the War has faced smears and had its meetings banished off-premises at Labour and trade union events for refusing to toe the Nato line on Ukraine. 

Their achievements in recent weeks demonstrate their ongoing, crucial importance to the left and the need to build their strength in 2024.

The Save Our Ticket Offices campaign

It was a declaration of war — the government announced in the summer it would close every railway ticket office in England. While France, Spain and Germany experiment with fixed-price unlimited travel tickets in a bid to encourage more use of rail as the least-polluting form of mass transit, Britain’s rulers continue their decades-long bid to degrade what has become one of the most expensive and unreliable rail services in Europe.

But rail workers and their unions fought back, organising a vibrant campaign which brought in passenger safety groups, disability and women’s rights activists and more to assert the importance of proper staffing. A token consultation met a response on an unprecedented scale, forcing total retreat in October. A victory for rail workers and users alike.

Paisley and District Trades Council 

When the Home Office chose to house refugees in the Muthu Glasgow River Hotel in Erskine almost a year ago, the first many locals knew of it was a stream of far-right propaganda on social media platforms. 

Where politicians failed, the trades council offered leadership — stepping-up to counter lies with truth, and allay misplaced fears in the communities of Erskine.

Ably assisted by the local YCL, Stand Up to Racism and faith groups, the trades council not only defended refugees from fascist intimidation, but created a warm, welcoming, safe space where refugees and activists alike could share music, food, and football. 

More than 47 weeks later, that struggle continues. 

Terence Davies 

Terence Davies was a remarkable working-class voice in British cinema who brought not just class consciousness to the screen, but also a remarkably affectionate attention to detail. 

Beginning with courageous autobiographical film-making that started as modest student films and developed in a personal language of cinematic reminiscence to the surprise hit Distant Voices Still Lives (1988) he stayed true to his class roots in his late masterpiece Sunset Song, a Scottish, Lawrencian epic, based on Lewis Crassic Gibbons’s book, that studies the repression of a free-thinking woman in the first tragic decades of the 20th century.

Benjamin Zephaniah 

Benjamin Zephaniah was justly celebrated in the pages of this paper as a truly remarkable pioneer of spoken-word poetry with a crystal clear political compass and deep infusion of native Brummie wit and urgency.

His impact as an eloquent spokesman for the Jamaican diaspora in Britain cannot be understated — no-one else raised awareness of this community with such pungency — and who better to remember as a hero in these days of crony civil lists and dodgy ennoblement than the man who refused them?

Barbara Walker

Our favourite in the line-up for the Turner Prize is a heroine whose work speaks with force and subtlety for the Windrush generation, and reinvents the meaning and status of drawing as a medium in contemporary British art.

Barbara Walker incorporates ID documents and patiently respectful portraiture in single images, and asserts the (temporary) presence of British citizens threatened with erasure in huge installations.

This is the best example this year of art pressed into service of a political cause, and changing our culture as it does so.

VILLAINS

Yaroslav Hunka & Justin Trudeau

On September 22, Canada’s Prime Minister and hundreds of MPs stood to applaud a veteran of the Nazi Waffen-SS. 

Following an address by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Speaker Anthony Rota drew attention to an old man in the gallery, praising him as a “Ukrainian hero” for having fought against Russia in the second world war, prompting the standing ovation. 

Rota later apologised, claiming he had become aware of more information about the former fighter in the SS’s Galizien division: but the Morning Star’s Kenny Coyle was able to expose the mythologising of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators as a long-running feature of Canadian politics.

Peter Mandelson

Even when Labour was in power he was involved in scandals from fixing passport applications to partying on a Russian oligarch’s yacht with George Osborne. 

More recent exposés in the US press of his close friendship with paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein haven’t done any more to reduce his poisonous influence on Labour, which under Keir Starmer has donned a zombie Blairism entirely out of touch with today’s crises. 

If you’re puzzled at the Starmer gang’s attacks on party figures way beyond the Corbyn-supporting left — the hostile briefings complained of by Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, the induced resignation from the party of long-term chief whip Nick Brown — look no further: our likely next PM is under the spell of a man obsessed with settling decades-old factional grudges.

Dalai Lama

The spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, unlike his predecessors, is not a tyrant ruling over a theocratic slave-based economy. But since 1959’s CIA-orchestrated revolt against land reform, after which he and 100,000 followers fled to India, he has been a champion of Western propaganda narratives promoting the dismemberment of the People’s Republic of China. 

This April he was forced to apologise after being caught on film asking a small child to suck his tongue, suggesting the abusive practices exposed in Western patriarchal religious hierarchies in recent decades may also apply in the East.

Javier Milei

Last year in this column we celebrated left victories in Brazil, Chile and Colombia, saluting what appeared to be a continental shift back towards socialism despite the constitutional coup against Peru’s elected Marxist president Pedro Castillo in December, followed by the repression of democracy protesters there with extreme violence. 

But 2023 has seen the left lose momentum in Chile, the beginnings of what may be a “lawfare” bid to oust Gustavo Petro in Colombia and, worst of all, the election of the free-market zealot Javier Milei, who has unleashed a veritable blitzkrieg of laws designed to gut the welfare state and disarm the labour movement. Solidarity with Argentinian unions planning a general strike.

Suella Braverman

OK, so she’s featured before! But Braverman sank to new depths in 2023, leading a concerted bid as home secretary to ban peace marches and seeking to inflame far-right passions with an artificial panic over non-existent threats to the Cenotaph on Armistice Day — ironically provoking actual clashes with the police at the Cenotaph as fascist hooligans, some sporting swastika tattoos, sought to mob the monument. 

She may have been sacked, but her anti-refugee venom still dominates Parliament and she clearly has her eye on the Tory leadership still — Braverman’s an ongoing menace.