When miners took on the state in their fight for jobs and communities
It is 40 years since the start of the longest, most bitter and one of the most fateful strikes in British history. In the spring of 1984, miners throughout the UK challenged the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher − not for more money, but for their jobs and communities.
Two years after Russia’s invasion – why you should stand with Ukraine
As we enter the third year of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, it’s time to restate some basic facts behind a war that has displaced more than 3.6 million internally and forced another 6.3 million to flee as refugees to other parts of Europe.
We want to show that we are humans: Palestine art in London
Palestine Museum founder Faisal Saleh and 20 artists defy the cancelling of their culture and identity with works offering a narrative of hope and beauty.
When a Labour council fought Tory spending cuts
Forty years ago, a number of Labour-led councils confronted the Thatcher government over spending cuts. Their resistance stands in complete contrast to councils today as they prepare to implement yet another round of brutal attacks on vital services.
Israeli forces deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza
As tens of thousands marched through London once more, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and voicing support for Palestinians, an analysis of the Israeli bombing campaign showed that the proportion of civilian deaths had reached record levels.
Social progress in Chile with or without the state?
Across the world people often try to use the powers they have been granted by the state to bring about social change. And sometimes they strive to go beyond the state to create autonomous enclaves. Take part in our joint discussion with Museum of Care on Thursday 23 November at 20:00.
Joining the Jewish contingent on the Palestinian march
Marching alongside Jewish comrades on the London protest condemning Israeli state war crimes in Gaza and calling for the liberation of Palestine.
Grenada – revolution and invasion, 40 years on Part I
“Mommy it’s my birthday, am I going to die on my birthday – they’re bombing.” That’s what Fatimah Gilliam, a Black American schoolgirl, asked her mother on 23 October 1983 as a massive force of American troops invaded the tiny island of Grenada. Today, Fatimah is a lawyer, a consultant and the author of Race Rules: What Your Black Friend Won’t Tell You. Some 40 years on she wants the invasion to be remembered “for a multitude of reasons”, and so has shared her childhood experience of these dramatic events.
Grenada – revolution and invasion, 40 years on. Part II
Forty years ago, in October 1983, the small Caribbean nation of Grenada was invaded by a massive US force, bringing to a halt a revolutionary experiment that had begun four years earlier. There are crucial lessons to learn from this tumultuous period that offer a microcosm of the problems faced by attempts to create popular democracy and transform the state from capitalist to socialist.
A war crime is a war crime
Gaza is without power, food and water. Bombs rain down, killing indiscriminately. This is more than revenge for Hamas atrocities committed during their incursion. This is Israeli state terror. It is barbaric and genocidal.
Yet this war crime in a series of war crimes against the long-suffering Palestinian people in Gaza – dubbed the world’s largest open-air prison – is, needless to say, ignored by the US and UK governments and by the EU.
Loach’s new blast against the system
Ken Loach’s new film is the third of a series that all feature a storyline that plays out against the backdrop of crumbling care services and the isolation of individuals from society. Sorry We Missed You; I, Daniel Blake and now The Old Oak can be seen as a three-part blast at Tory Britain – the inequality, unfairness and grinding poverty that their system forces onto people.
The Canadian-American-Jewish artist’s development is marked by a feeling of restless change, with the ability to reinventing himself, whilst absorbing a wide range of interests, all with a distinct political edge and sense of vulnerability.
Tax the rich? Not on Rachel Reeves’ watch
Rachel Reeves is Keir Starmer’s Shadow Chancellor, which means she’s responsible for Labour’s policy on the economy. And she’s sticking to the first of Labour’s 5 missions which puts growth before all as the source of the income needed to do all the other good things on offer. Like reducing debt, making everyone better off, restoring the NHS and other public services.
As the parties ‘converge’, how should we use our vote?
The next General Election campaign is well under way, although the date for holding the poll is as yet undecided. Both major parties are manoeuvring for position on various issues. One consequence is “convergence”, or the coming together of key Tory and Labour policies. Which begs the question about who to vote for when the election actually takes place.
The scandal of food bank Britain
The first food bank in the UK was launched in Salisbury in 2000 by Paddy and Carol Henderson after being contacted by a desperate mother who was having to send her children to bed hungry because she couldn’t afford to provide sufficient food. Little did they suspect how their numbers would mushroom.
Time to move on from strikes as protests
Protest strikes can’t beat Tory anti-union onslaught. Starmer favours fiscal discipline, aka low pay. United action and political leadership is needed.
Climate crisis: Just Stop Capitalism
Nothing will make governments act on the climate emergency, because they do not exist to do that. They exist to enable global corporations to continue business as usual and they plan to go right on doing that.
Joe McPhee’s Sound of Joy
Four more evenings of joy with Decoy and Joe McPhee. As a potent antidote to these beleaguered times, this music can’t be bettered.
Light and shade
Four outstanding musicians: Joe McPhee on saxophone with Decoy – John Edwards on bass, Steve Noble on drums and Alexander Hawkins on organ.
Munich’s ‘waiting room’ for displaced persons
How “Displaced Persons”, the surviving remnants of persecution, asserted their autonomy in Allied-occupied Munich between 1945 and 1950
Debt crisis would hit a Starmer government from Day One
When the dust had settled after the 2010 general election and the Tory-Lib Dem coalition had taken office, an incoming Treasury minister discovered a parting note left by his Labour predecessor, Liam Byrne. It’s message was clear. “I’m afraid there is no money” it read.
No to sportswashing! Football should belong to the people
Elite sport is rapidly being captured by big money and re-purposed. Billionaires, oligarchs and corporations are now being pushed aside by oil-rich nation states who use football and other sports to disguise the repressive nature of their regimes.
Cultural revolution at No.21
The Brixton Artists Collective: a moment of hope that put working class, Black, LGBT+ and ethnic minority artists into the spotlight.
Celebrating International Workers Day
Ukraine Solitary Campaign members joined striking nurses and other NHS staff outside St Thomas’ hospital to the sound of drum and constant honking by buses and passing vehicles.
Extinction Rebellion hit the streets
Tens of thousands of people protesting about climate breakdown joined a 4-day festival in and around Parliament and Westminster, organised by Extinction Rebellion, together with many other groups.
Seeing is believing: Soutine and Kossoff
Soutine and Kossoff relied on their intuition, each responding within different formal languages, bringing the painted object into the viewer’s space.
Junior doctors out on strike
Junior hospital doctors, that is all doctors below the level of consultant, have begun a 3-day national strike for a 26% increase in salary to restore the real-term loss in their income that has occurred since 2008/9.
Lies, more lies and the invasion of Iraq
Twenty years ago Iraq was invaded by American and British forces in a disastrous and illegal war that has had endless repercussions since.
Russians united by hatred of Putin march in London
Russians march in London, calling for “Victory for Ukraine, Freedom for Russia”, “Stop Putin, stop the war”.
A fight for survival
Pamfir – a film from Ukraine about a strong, rough but decent man who loves his wife and son, and whose dreams collide with the corruption at the heart of a rural village on the border with Romania.
Without interfering with the drama, there is an obvious symbolism here with the plight of Ukraine, trapped as it mobilises the people in a fight for survival against its powerful imperialist neighbour to the East.
Why I stand with Ukraine against Russia’s invasion
It’s a year since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In an exclusive podcast human rights lawyer Bill Bowring condemns it as imperialism.
Defiant march in support of Ukraine
On the anniversary of the Russian attack on their country, about 3000 Ukrainians and British supporters marched through Notting Hill Gate, London, to the Russian Embassy to protest at the cowardice and brutality of the invasion.
Talking to the body, through the body
Maria Bartuszová is one of the most inventive and meaningful sculptors of her generation, constantly pushing the boundaries of what sculpture could be.
Farewell to Anthony Green, visionary eccentric of domestic life
Artist Peter Clossick, past president of The London Group, shares his tribute to Anthony Green RA who died on St Valentine’s day.
‘The working class is back’, says RMT leader
Whitehall was taken over by teachers, civil servants, university staff, train drivers, border force staff and many others on February 1 as over 500,000 trade unionists took action in support of pay claims and against understaffing and worsening conditions.
Why unions should prepare a General Strike to remove the Tories
The cost-of-living strike wave sweeping the UK is in reality a struggle for political and economic power – between workers fighting what are in effect pay cuts and the Tory government plus their corporate allies.
Make 2023 the year of revolutionary change
In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci, languishing in Mussolini’s fascist jail, wrote that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.
Today, more than a century later, “morbid symptoms” are acutely present in our society. Rather than a cause for despair, this is a challenge to all those confronting the system on every continent to create practical pathways to the new.
Tories have ‘left us out in the cold’, say nurses
Thousands of nurses from more than 55 NHS Trusts have staged new strikes in support of their pay claim and plan joint action with ambulance staff next month as their bitter dispute with the Tory government continues.
How the Pentonville 5 can inspire a way forward
Rail workers from station staff, to track workers and signallers, are showing that they are not prepared to pay the price for an economic and social crisis they did not create.
Copyright means poverty for creators and riches for corporations
State-enforced copyright laws benefit the corporations and in the digital age have led to massive surveillance, argues journalist, blogger and campaigner Glyn Moody. His latest book, Walled Culture, debunks the argument that copyright protects creators and shows how in fact it leads to widespread poverty. Glyn explains how the digital licence system has undermined libraries and suggests ways creators can take control of their work.
Cezanne: Two views
- From 40 francs to £150 million by artist Peter Clossick
- The well-known but unknown Cezanne by art historian Corinna Lotz
A revolutionary road opens up as Tories flounder
As refuse workers across Scotland become the latest group to take strike action in response to soaring inflation and more than 500,000 people join the Enough is Enough campaign, it’s clear that a social crisis and confrontation is on the cards.
Inflation is capitalism in meltdown. Here’s what we should do.
The value of money is melting away. It’s the flip side of soaring prices which started taking off in 2020. The impact on wages, held down and declining in value for more than 30 years, has provoked a sudden resistance globally.
All the pomp in the world cannot hide the depth of the crisis
The wall-to-wall, deferential coverage of the transition of monarchy has a wider significance than reporting on the death of a queen who was on the throne for 70 years. Relentless, sycophantic broadcasting and page upon page in the mainstream media is in practice a systematic state-led reinforcement of the status quo.
The crisis engulfing the Johnson government, with over 40% of Tory MPs wanting him to resign as prime minister, is symptomatic of a new world disorder in which socio- political instability and upheaval are everyday events.
Engaging with ‘messy realities’ in Ukraine and Taiwan
Russia’s attempt to annex Ukraine has prompted comparisons to Taiwan, which has long faced the threat of Chinese invasion.
Rail workers take up the Tory gauntlet
Rail workers from station staff, to track workers and signallers, are showing that they are not prepared to pay the price for an economic and social crisis they did not create.
Ukraine’s right to self-determination is absolute
Ukraine’s population has united to take up the struggle with an armed citizenry creating a kind of people’s war.
“L’Etat, c’est moi” is what Johnson is claiming
A fatal political crisis when eminent historian Peter Hennessy says that it’s beyond doubt that Boris Johnson is a “rogue prime minister”?
Poet Adnan al-Sayegh responds to his ‘cancellation’ at the Third International House of Poetry Festival in Irbid in Jordan
Huge London support for Ukraine
Over 150,000 people demanded an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and denounced Putin’s regime in a powerful and spirited demonstration in London on March 26.
Invasion of Ukraine is about a return to Tsarism, not NATO
Russia alone is responsible for the decision to invade Ukraine, laying waste to its cities, towns and villages, killing civilians, and bombing hospitals.
Message from Russia’s Feminist Antiwar Resistance for March 8
Don’t give us flowers, better to go out and lay them in memory of the dead civilians of Ukraine
Oppose Putin’s attempt to destroy Ukraine
The cowardly, unprovoked attack on Ukraine by Vladimir Putin’s forces has nothing to do with Russia’s so-called security concerns.
No to war – Russia hands off Ukraine!
Please sign this statement launched by the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (UK). Real Democracy Movement has signed this as an organisation.
Self-determination for Ukraine
The Real Democracy Movement was proud to support the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign’s picket outside the offices of Russia Television
Removing Johnson won’t be enough
There is something rotten in the UK state. And simply removing Johnson will not solve it.
The Brave New World of Amazon Turk – breaking the logic of alienation
Danielle Dean takes us into a sci-fi world that is here already, dipping into weird neologisms, such as Requesters, Turks, and HITs
The old system is dying. Let’s build a true democracy
The Tories stagger from pillar to post, incapable of leading as the Omicron variant becomes dominant, and Labour’s leaders continue to tail-end the government.