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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Smile and be a villain
British satire may be instinctively anti-Tory, but with Jeremy Hardy’s death we lost one of the few prepared to stand up for Corbyn’s Labour Party, writes SAM WHEELER
Jeremy Hardy reading the names of Iraq War victims at a Stop the War Coalition rally in 2016
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
Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
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
THE death of Jeremy Hardy last week left two worlds, that of satire and that of the political left in Britain, far poorer. It seems a useful moment to reflect on the shift in where those worlds cross over in the last two decades.
Fifteen years ago I did my GCSE English coursework on Hardy’s documentary, “Jeremy Hardy vs the Israeli Army,” and in my head he remains a part of those years, at the beginning of the century, when so many of my generation were working out their politics to a backdrop of the “war on terror.”
His own frenetic revulsion at the injustices he saw around him fit with the time. Above all I remember a range of voices from comedy that challenged the powerful; the superbly crafted dialogues of John Bird and John Fortune, the sleazy, surreal darkness of Monkeydust, the raw anger sheathed in sarcasm of Charlie Brooker (before he got his happily ever after).
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