Part One: Wales Part Two: England It is impossible to discuss Scottish politics without mentioning the I word. Scotland has been part of the United Kingdom since 1707, but the rise of the independence movement over the last decade has called that into question. An occasionally fractious referendum in 2014, won by a comfortable though not crushing margin by the No campaign,…
As students around the country took to the streets to protest against climate change, one of the biggest issues we face globally, politicians and commentators took to Twitter. Not to commend young people for getting involved in politics, but to disparage, mock and belittle their efforts. Andrea Leadsom labelled them truants, apparently not thinking climate change an important enough issue to miss…
“Freedom of movement will end when we leave the European Union,” stated Labour’s 2017 manifesto – as if it was a fact of nature and not a political decision affecting millions of people. Corbyn’s strategy of deflecting attention from Brexit to focus on austerity meant that, for almost two years, this section of the manifesto largely avoided scrutiny. When the Labour Campaign…
How exactly do we conceive of housing? This is a fundamental question, and one that never quite seems to be satisfactorily answered. So often, getting housing is treated as kind of status symbol, a way of indicating success under capitalism. This issue goes to the heart of the ways in which politicians are trying to deal with the housing crisis, and the…
On September 10th last year, my friend Amaya was kidnapped from her safehouse by the paramilitary police in Leon, Nicaragua. She was taken to El Chipotle prison, notorious for human rights abuses, and transferred shortly afterwards to La Esperanza women’s prison, where she remains. A student leader in the anti-Ortega movement, she was charged with terrorism. Her trial has been delayed several…
Part One: Wales Looking For A New England The political narrative of the 2010s has been dominated by threats to the United Kingdom’s multinational union. The moderate SDLP has been supplanted by Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, independence dominates the agenda in Scotland, and the looming weight of Brexit could still place an unbearable strain on the ties that bind the union…
Wales is the least interesting of the UK’s four constituent nations. No hegemony of population and class as in England, no surging separatist tide as in Scotland, no threat of reigniting an age-old tinderbox as in Northern Ireland. In Wales, there’s just one party. A single centre-left party that has managed Wales for nearly a hundred years, a fate that would surely…
We are Labour members who support Jeremy Corbyn in his leadership and the progressive, socialist programme and anti-racist principles of the Labour Party. We have seen antisemitism from Labour members and supporters, online or offline. We recognise that as a movement we have been too slow to acknowledge this problem, too tolerant of the existence of antisemitic views within our ranks, too…
