The idea of the “sardines” is a very simple one: all together against Italian far right politician Matteo Salvini’s rhetoric of hate.
Their first demonstration was held in Bologna on 14 November and since then they have been unstoppable. From Torino to Palermo, thousands of people have joined the movement holding homemade placards and chanting Bella Ciao.
The Tory election victory transformed Boris Johnson from a prime minister who could barely win a vote in Parliament to one who can, for now, do as he pleases. It is a grotesque prospect. Johnson is a serial liar, a product of the ruling class who, until the morning of 13 December, lacked the respect of many in it.
As recently as October, David Cameron compared Johnson to a “greased piglet that manages to slip through people’s hands”.
Yet the meaning of Johnson’s victory for his class was clear. “Hedge funds enjoyed a bumper payday”, the Financial Times reported.
The election results in the North of Ireland saw a drop in the overall share of the vote for the two main parties at Stormont. Both the DUP (down 5.4 percent) and Sinn Fein (down 6.7 percent).
The DUP lost two MPs to the Alliance Party in Strangford and to Sinn Fein in North Belfast, where John Finucane whose father Pat was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries, ousted Nigel Dodds, one of its leading strategists. Sinn Fein dramatically lost Foyle to the SDLP.
The devastating blow of last month’s general election defeat will be hard for Labour activists and all those who willed a Corbyn victory to get over.
A battle for interpretation began immediately after the exit poll, with Parliamentary Labour Party figures leaping onto our screens to tell us Corbyn was entirely to blame. But, as Joseph Choonara shows in this issue, the problems for Labour date back to the Blair years.
As the election began the press was full of stories about the number of MPs, particularly women, stepping down because of the “horrific abuse” they have received. MPs such as Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Nicky Morgan dominated these reports, despite the fact that Diane Abbott MP was the recipient of half of all offensive tweets to female MPs in the six weeks preceding the official start of the election.
Lawyers don’t generally enjoy a very good reputation with the public, still less with most socialists. Ian Macdonald QC who has died aged 80 will rightly live long in the memories of many socialists and activists. All his life he was a fighter for justice and freedom.
Ian is probably best remembered now for his huge contribution in immigration law. Indeed he wrote the book on it. The standard textbook bears his name. But Ian cut his teeth doing criminal cases in the late 60s and early 70s.
Boris Johnson’s proposed Brexit deal threw the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) under a bus with his plan to create customs checks in the Irish Sea. In the run up to the election in the North of Ireland, the DUP has been stirring up its supporters by talking loudly of the union with Britain being under threat if this deal goes ahead.
Loyalist paramilitary groups, especially the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the leader of the Belfast flag protests in 2012 Jamie Bryson, have been organising public meetings against what they call Johnson’s “betrayal act”.
As we go to press the election campaign has just two weeks to run, but predicting the outcome would be a fool’s game. What is beyond doubt, however, is the dramatic contrast between the campaigns of Labour, fighting for a whole range of progressive polices, and the Tories, who are sticking to the single slogan of “getting Brexit done”.
The terrible deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants last month once again brought to the fore just how murderous are the government’s anti-migrant policies. They are policies that have seen scores of Syrian, Iraqi, Afghani and others having endure untold miseries — sometimes ending in severe injury and even death — in their attempts to reach this country, as witnessed in the dreadful scenes around Calais and northern France and, indeed, across the continent.
Sajid Javid, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, regularly makes reference to his father having been a bus driver, and inevitably this has figured in half-hearted attempts to proclaim the Tories as the new champions of the British working class.
Of course, his father was only briefly a bus driver before opening a shop, but regardless of that Javid can much more accurately be described as an ultra-Thatcherite multi-millionaire international banker. He is reportedly worth £8 million — hardly a man of the people!
