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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Manchester is red
Manchester remains a Labour bastion, but there are forces stirring beneath the party's formidable machine, writes SAM WHEELER
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
MANCHESTER remained the largest Labour group in the country last week, with 93 of 96 seats. Even on a rather poor night for the party nationally, the Liberals were confined to a single ward. That was West Didsbury, successor to the Didsbury Ward of Manchester’s last elected Tory councillor, Peter Hilton, who finally left the town hall in 1996.
Even more worrying perhaps for those that imagine a Liberal revival in the city of Bright and Cobden, they only came second in a further seven wards. Rather, it was the Manchester Green Party who were runners up in 13 of the city’s 32 wards despite having almost none of the campaign architecture of the other parties.
Further, the closest margin of the night came not from Manchester’s erstwhile opposition, but from Independent Ken Dobson in the staunchly working class Clayton & Openshaw division, where he ran Labour’s Sean McHale within a dozen votes.
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The social base of the old Tory Party has disappeared as surely as that of Labour, argues ANDREW MURRAY – today’s right are the debased offspring of a capitalism that speculates without investing and profits without producing
If true, the photo’s history is a damning indictment of the systematic exploitation of non-Western journalists by Western media organisations – a pattern that persists today, posit KATE CANTRELL and ALISON BEDFORD
Your Party can become an antidote to Reform UK – but only by rooting itself in communities up and down the country, says CLAUDIA WEBBE
LOTTE COLLETT welcomes the arrival of a new party for the left, a vehicle for councils to finally fight for progressive policies on housing, green spaces and public facilities, rather than administering cuts and misery from central government