Ninety years ago, the Spanish civil war pitted an elected popular front government against Franco’s fascist forces actively supported by Hitler and Mussolini. Take a look at Picasso’s famous painting of the Nazi bombing of Guernica now displayed at the UN. Left-wingers urgently pressed the UK’s Conservative Government to arm
The south London suburb of Bromley is blue on the electoral map but many residents are getting red in the face about the council’s vandalism on road safety. It illuminates wider populist and binary battles that pit drivers against pedestrians. Bromley’s transport supremo, Councillor Nick Bennett is driving an unpopular
The new ZZ Top acts in the leftist political circus, Zarah and Zack, are attracting attention but Sultana is intransigently one-dimensional and Polanski is, well, green on security. Sultana is the worse of the pair. Despite Russian imperialism’s war to snuff out an independent Ukraine and menace its near neighbours
Russia’s war against Ukraine and the Hamas/Israel conflict have spawned two solidarity networks: one healthy and one that is definitely not. Visible and practical support for Ukraine is vital and should be maintained as the war grinds on. Ultra-leftist organisations active on Palestine oppose our government, as well as Israel,
The adage that ‘America eventually does the right thing after exhausting all other options’ is apocryphally, and probably falsely attributed to Winston Churchill. Churchill or at least his bust, is back in the Oval office after being removed by Biden. He was restored by Donald Trump, the president who –
The small town of Ranya in Iraqi Kurdistan once loomed large in British foreign policy and now matters a great deal to Labour’s migration policy. The Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein’s genocidal dictatorship began there in 1991 and was nearly crushed before John Major pioneered a safe haven over the
The high octane theatrics of recent weeks in Washington have frazzled and terrified the world. It’s all been great TV as Donald Trump revealingly said after kneecapping the Ukrainian President in the Oval Office and in his big bang announcement on tariffs. Will Hutton eloquently nails the fundamental flaws in
Party meetings become tough and tedious when moderates resist predatory groups that exploit Labour as a recruiting ground but don’t share its values of social democratic change by parliamentary means. In the early 1980s there was a running confrontation in Brighton and elsewhere with the Militant Tendency, formally known as
This year sees the 50th anniversary of the referendum to leave or remain in the Common Market, as the EU was then called, and which the UK had joined two years earlier. The referendum was Labour Prime Minister’s Harold Wilson’s gambit to overcome the party’s deep divisions on Europe and
Slaves of Roman emperors reminded them they were mortal with the words “look behind you.” I sometimes think that each CLP should elect an Officer for Devil’s Advocacy. Their wise words could be “look around you.” We can see that the lamps of the Left are going out all over
