If you are reading the Social Review for business or pleasure, you will surely already be aware that it’s Heart Unions Week. Trade unionism and workplace democracy are at the core of all that we do as socialists, and every day Britain’s trade unions provide vital support to workers in pretty much every industry you can think of. They offer advice and…
Think about a child you know. How sure are you that they can read? As a secondary school teacher, I would regularly sit down with the parents of fourteen-year-olds at parents evening, and inform them that according to our software, their child had a reading age of eleven. “But I’ve heard her read fluently”, the parents would reply, aghast, “ her primary…
During this pandemic, there’s been many an invocation of Julian of Norwich. She was a Christian mystic, who lived as an anchorite – someone (usually a woman) who would wall themselves off from the world in a literal sense, with prayers for the dead being said as they were bricked into rooms adjoining churches, to meditate upon God and pray for the…
I like to think of myself as a young, hip and culturally au fait person who understands the lingo, political and otherwise. We all like to think of ourselves in ways that may not be entirely accurate, and we all have things in our lives – drinks we can’t drink anymore, jeans that don’t fit, songs we don’t understand, celebrities and, increasingly,…
Until quite recently I rarely thought about the noughties. It was just a warehouse decade for my childhood, an apolitical sink hole of low rise jeans and foreign wars on terrestrial television. Nothing happened then- or, more correctly, nothing happened to me, which, when you’re 13, is the same thing. Of late, however, I have begun to think about the decade in…
Morgan and Pete found a way to connect to the internet, and take a deep dive, helped by Annie Kelly (UK Correspondent, QAnon Anonymous), into the world of the QAnon conspiracy theory. How proliferate is it? How do well-meaning individuals become radicalised? How can they be de-radicalised? And what’s the world’s first conspiracy theory, and what does it have to do with…
Bertolt Brecht was one of the most innovative and unique cultural products of “the Left”, his work is the product of lived experiences in Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, the United States, and the German Democratic Republic. Consequently, Brecht, politically and ideologically, inhabits a distinct space that has many lessons for socialism today. Brecht lived through multiple defeats of socialism in an age…