Opinion

The rich man at his castle,/ The poor man at his gate;/ God made them high or lowly./ And ordered their estate.

That was one of the verses of a popular hymn we used to sing when I was a child.

Exactly one mile away from my primary school is a real castle and it was here that Henry Charles Albert David Windsor married Meghan Markle on 19 May.

Amid the great depression of the 1930s the British Empire was rocked by a series of mass strikes and anti-colonial revolts across the Caribbean colonies. These events were central in the making of the Caribbean working class and reached their climax in Jamaica from late April to June 1938.

The first Scottish Labour conference with Richard Leonard as its leader took place in Dundee last month. Delegates were treated to speeches from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, shadow chancellor John McDonnell, as well as Leonard, who all put forward a bold, radical and socialist vision for Scotland.

“In the early 1930s, the Jews of Germany were hounded, beaten and sometimes murdered by mobs and the state alike. In the same years the blacks of the American South were hounded, beaten and sometimes murdered as well.” So reads the introduction to a revealing new book by James Q Whitman.

Today’s debates on the nature of Trump’s presidency and the way it has boosted far-right parties across the globe lends urgency to this story: how Hitler’s new Nazi state drew on US state racism to help consolidate and legitimise its new regime.