Feature

It was only a few months ago that professor John Curtice’s blunt summary of the council elections captured a spectacularly low ebb in the fortunes of Ukip: “It was a night in which big swings were rare — apart from a collapse in the Ukip vote.”

Judith Orr

Kamasi Washington refuses to label his music as jazz or any other genre, and with good reason — this LA born saxophonist’s compositions defy pigeonholing.

After his stunning debut, triple album The Epic, followed by an EP, comes double CD Heaven and Earth (a third CD is hidden in the cover).

Darker in places than The Epic, the album gives expression to the anger and protest against racism seen on the streets of the US. But Heaven and Earth is nevertheless uplifting.

Frida Kahlo’s image has become a pop cult touchstone. With the crown of flowers, monobrow, dark eyes and the sometimes-omitted moustache, this disabled bisexual Mexican communist’s image is eclipsing Che Guevara’s as the in-the-know poster child for rebellion with a zeitgeist feminist update.

Mariano Rajoy is gone after seven years of austerity with an iron fist. The now ex prime minister lost a motion of no confidence in late May and his People’s Party (PP) lost control of government. The motion was put forward by the Labour-type Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), following pressure from the anti-austerity party Podemos. PSOE’s Pedro Sánchez announced he will lead a “transitional government” to reestablish “governability” and “democratic normality” before calling general elections. The legislative term is due to finish in 2020.

Is it possible to describe Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a fascist party?
I wouldn’t say that the AfD as a whole is a fascist party. However, it is possible to say, the AfD is the party of the fascists. Not because everybody in the AfD is a fascist but because for neo-fascists the AfD is the way to infiltrate state institutions, to build racist protest movements and to gain allies for this strategy.

Events at the US-Mexico border mark another low for Donald Trump. They also remind us of the long record of exploitation and persecution of migrants to the US from Central America. For over 100 years employers north of the border have relied on migrants from the south, drawing in workers indispensable to American capitalism. At the same time US governments have periodically targeted the migrants as aliens, “invaders” and enemies of the wider society, launching campaigns of exclusion like that enacted by Trump and cheered on by the racist Right.

‘No matter how good a woman, she will circle the kitchen stove. No matter how inferior a man, he will travel the world.’ This was a common saying in pre-revolutionary China, as was the answer to someone knocking at the door of a household: “There is no-one home” — there are no men at home.

The results of the local elections in England last month were decried as a failure for Corbyn and Labour by the Tories, with much of the media coverage taking this as their cue. The usual suspects among Corbyn’s opponents on the Labour right were quick to add their voices suggesting that “peak Corbyn” had been reached.

In reply, the Labour left robustly defended the results as an untrammelled success for Labour and another step towards Downing Street for Corbyn.

But neither of these interpretations really capture what the local elections actually point to.

There is something quite peculiar about the first history of contemporary British Trotskyism being written by someone who was, during the 1980s, a member of the Communist Party — rather like a version of the Acts of the Apostles penned by Pontius Pilate.

Can you explain why the protests had the focus around the border?

Firstly stop calling it a border, there is no border. This is all part of the land of Palestine. If you want you can call it an Israeli-imposed barrier because that’s what it is. The protest called itself a great march of return.

The idea was that 70 years of displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people must come to an end and they be able to go home, and since about 80 percent of Gaza’s people are descendants of 1948 refugees the idea of return is very relevant to them.