Economists estimate extreme poverty could be drastically reduced for a fraction of global defence spending, yet military budgets continue to expand year on year, says JON TRICKETT MP, ahead of the Stop the War International Conference on Saturday
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Scottish independence from what and for whom?
The captivating car crash at the top of the SNP is indicative of a wider crisis of nationalism — for every nation in Britain, writes NICK WRIGHT
SCANDAL: Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell has been arrested as part of probe into the SNP’s finances
As Unison launches its Year of Women Workers, ANNIE COGAN-THOMAS argues that stronger organisation and collective bargaining are essential to winning equality
Trade unions, trades councils and community organisations must work together to build lasting solidarity and resistance to the far right, argues DREW GILCHRIST
Recent violence in Belfast was not spontaneous — it was built on years of failure and political neglect, argues STIOFAN O NUALLAIN
As delegates meet in Brighton this week, Unison faces pressing questions about pay, organising, workers’ rights and political representation, explains ANDY CHAFFER
Andy Burnham’s growing stature has fuelled hopes of a Labour revival – but ALAN SIMPSON warns that Britain’s crisis runs far deeper than just its leadership and traces its roots to decades of financialised capitalism
NOW that the Scots have a Glasgow-born First Minister of Pakistani heritage, London has a Tooting-born mayor of Pakistani heritage and Britain has as Prime Minister a man whose Punjabi family came to Southampton via “British” East Africa, the contradictory nature of a British national sensibility is up for negotiation.
On one hand, we have the effort to construct a notion of British identity that synthesises Welsh, Scottish and English sensibilities with a generally well-meaning effort to gather into this elastic category people whose migrant journeys are shaped by Britain’s imperial presence and the industrialisation that imperial tribute funded.
Where this effort attends to the oppressive and exploitative essence of Britain’s bloody imperial rule it plays a progressive role. Where it doesn’t, it fits into the bourgeois mystification of nationhood. In this sense, Black Lives Matter has proved an essential measure in shaping a more progressive national culture: black lives matter today because, for the time of the British empire, black lives didn’t.
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Starmer sabotaged Labour with his second referendum campaign, mobilising a liberal backlash that sincerely felt progressive ideals were at stake — but the EU was then and is now an entity Britain should have nothing to do with, explains NICK WRIGHT
Deep disillusionment with the Westminster cross-party consensus means rupture with the status quo is on the cards – bringing not only opportunities but also dangers, says NICK WRIGHT
VINCE MILLS cautions over the perils and pitfalls of ‘a new left party’
From Gaza complicity to welfare cuts chaos, Starmer’s baggage accumulates, and voters will indeed find ‘somewhere else’ to go — to the Greens, nationalists, Lib Dems, Reform UK or a new, working-class left party, writes NICK WRIGHT