Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
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The historical echoes of the Peterloo Massacre
BERNADETTE HYLAND finds similarities between the build up to the slaughter in 1819 and to today’s working-class struggle
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
Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
RAMZY BAROUD decries the rats of Gaza, the rodent and human type. Both abound as profiteering from tragedy reaches obscene levels
ON AUGUST 16 1819, Mary Fildes and members of the Female Reform Society marched to St Peter’s Fields in the centre of Manchester with many other other people to angrily demand the end of political corruption, hunger and unemployment.
The women said: “Every succeeding night brings with it new terror, so that we are sick of life and weary of a world, where poverty, wretchedness, tyranny and injustice have so long been permitted to reign amongst men.”
As Fildes and a peaceful crowd of tens of thousands of men, women and children listened to a speech by radical orator Henry Hunt, they were attacked without warning by the military, sent in by Manchester’s unelected authorities, resulting in many deaths and injuries.
Similar stories
Labour will find increases in the state pension age are unacceptable, just as cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance, personal independence payments and universal credit are — it needs to change direction immediately, writes PCS general secretary FRAN HEATHCOTE
From hunting rare pamphlets at book sales to online panels and courses on trade unionism and class politics, the MML continues connecting archive treasures with the movements fighting for a better world, writes director MEIRIAN JUMP
The government cracking down on something it can’t comprehend and doesn’t want to engage with is a repeating pattern of history, says KEITH FLETT
BEN CHACKO reports on the struggles against sexism, racism and the brutish British state that featured at Matchwomen’s Festival this year