Feature

Joseph Arch, agricultural labourer, trade unionist and Liberal MP, died in February 1919 at the age of 92. Today he is almost forgotten, yet in his lifetime tens of thousands of agricultural workers looked to him as a leader. In the 1870s, in response to poverty and unemployment in agricultural communities, he was at the heart of an explosion of trade unionism that terrified landowners and farmers.

The Iranian Revolution of February 1979 was one of the most startling events of the 20th century. This is true not just because of the almost total participation of the entire population in the active overthrow of the Shah, the dictatorial self-proclaimed monarch, but also because of the determination of the new regime to install what it described as an “Islamic Republic”.

In a context of growing political turmoil and polarisation, the far right are attempting to win the battle of ideas. They aim to seize on the racism that comes from the top of society — from islamophobia to myths about refugees — and sharpen it. In the process their goal is to make their ideas more acceptable and in turn to win larger numbers to their politics.

The #MeToo campaign has rightly shone a glaring light on the misogyny and discrimination that women experience. Less publicised has been the striking increase in inequality that women are experiencing as a result of austerity, cuts to services and changes to the benefits system.

Recent government statistics show that women will shoulder a startling 85 percent of the burden of the government’s cuts to social security and tax changes by 2020. They also show that women’s incomes are being hit twice as hard as men’s as a result of changes to the tax and benefit system.

It is astonishing that, as I write this article, two months before Britain was scheduled to leave the European Union (EU), and after two and a half years of negotiation and planning, it is entirely unclear what fate awaits us.

Back in summer 2016, few people predicted that one of the greatest stumbling blocks would prove to be the Irish question — an issue fusing the legacy of Britain’s colonial past with the EU’s determination to police its external borders.

An extraordinary transformation in the image of the Labour Party happened in 2015 with Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader. A party that had acted as an efficient and loyal servant of the capitalist class was suddenly speaking about a challenge to big business, the banks, and the super-rich.

This month sees the 140th anniversary of the Battle at Isandlwana. This, the first major encounter in the Anglo-Zulu War and a decisive win for the Zulu, will be commemorated and celebrated across KwaZulu Natal in South Africa. Isandlwana brought the name “Zulu” to the attention of the world and established them as the paramount native force on the African continent.

Rosa Luxemburg is, without a doubt, one of the most important revolutionaries to emerge from that tumultuous period that ran from the end of the 19th century through to the aftermath of the First World War. This was a time of immense social, political, technological and economic change. It was also the time when socialist revolution became real — and Luxemburg contributed to theorising and partaking in those revolutions, right up until her murder at the hands of the counter-revolutionaries in Berlin on 15 January 1919.

The film BlacKkKlansman by Spike Lee, in the context of the rise of the far-right in the US and globally, has once again put a spotlight on the history of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The KKK claims a near 150-year history since its origins in the US’s Deep South after the American Civil War of 1861-65.

Transgender Day of Remembrance on 20 November 2018 commemorated 369 trans people murdered globally that year. The 2017 figure was 325, itself an increase on 2016. These figures don’t cover the much higher numbers who took their own lives.