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.
What began as a discussion of sexual harassment has broadened out to other aspects of the fight for women’s liberation. But working class women must be at the centre of debate, writes Sally Campbell.
The #MeToo movement, which took off in reaction to the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault revelations, has continued to reshape discussions around women’s equality.
A new book examines how Hitler’s early regime in the 1930s looked to US laws on immigration, citizenship and mixed marriage to legitimise itself. It is a crucial history in the era of Trump, writes Roddy Slorach.
“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.
The SNP’s reign as the dominant force in Scottish politics lost ground last year in both the council and general elections. In May they failed to gain outright control of any one council. In June their majority in the Scottish Parliament was reduced from 56 seats to 35.
The government and its allies in the media are once again fuelling anti-Muslim attitudes, this time with their attack on the right of young Muslim girls to wear the hijab at school.
Following the chief inspector of schools Amanda Spielman’s call for primary schools to consider banning the hijab, Neena Lall, the head of St Stephens School in Newham, east London, imposed such a ruling. But after a meeting of more than 150 parents, she scrapped it, and apologised for her huge error of judgement.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who died on 3 January, was the director of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and one of the most important anti-racist activists and intellectuals in Britain.
Sivanandan talked and wrote on all aspects of racism in an anti-imperialist, Marxist framework. He spoke out strongly against the idea of celebrating fixed ethnic or racial communities as the basis for fighting racism. He said that the fight must come out of “communities of resistance” — people who came together and thus defined themselves as a community in the fight against racism.
Gay activists played an important role in anti-fascist resistance. Noel Halifax tells the little-known story of the artist and writer turned freedom fighter Willem Arondeus, who was executed by the Nazis in the Netherlands 75 years ago.
Willem Arondeus was born in 1895, the son of theatre designers, and grew up in Amsterdam one of six children. At an early age he showed an interest in art and writing, which his parents encouraged, and in homosexuality, which his parents did not.
At the age of 17 he came out fully and refused to hide his sexuality. At the time homosexuality was legal in the Netherlands; nonetheless when he was 18 his parents kicked him out to fend for himself. He survived, but in impoverished conditions, continuing his interest in painting and writing.
The level of extortion made obvious to millions last month is a sharp illustration of the logic of capital.
Carillion was a creature of government cronyism and capitalist dysfunction. It was born in 1999 when parent company Tarmac sought to refocus on its core business of building supplies and span off Carillion, which inherited the facilities management and construction business.
The secret of Carillion’s early success was the manner in which the recently elected government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown expanded the previous Conservative administration’s privatisation programme.
I visited Auschwitz for the first time last November as part of Unite Against Fascism’s annual trip. I was one of a diverse delegation of activists. Seeing the camps, but also visiting the ghettos in Krakow and learning of the persecution the Jews experienced within them, was a deeply distressing experience.
Karl Marx was born two centuries ago. There have been ups and downs since, but he’s never gone entirely out of fashion. Sally Campbell introduces a monthly column looking at his life, work and relevance today.
The spectre of Karl Marx has never disappeared — a fact that will be reinforced when his bicentenary is celebrated this year on 5 May. A production at the National Theatre recently portrayed him as a lovable rogue. And a forthcoming film by Raoul Peck shows the young Marx, and his great friend Friedrich Engels, embedded in the revolutionary movements of the 1840s.
