John Clossick

The British establishment revels in its certainties, not least its “British values”. Actions, say ministers, are always consistent with international legal obligations and “our values as a nation”. Yet torture led directly to the Iraq war. Wide-ranging hypocrisy is plain for all to see.

Theresa May declares claims of abuse by British troops against former detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan are “an industry of vexatious allegations”. The European Human Rights Convention formally bans torture. So the Tory response is withdrawal from parts of the convention.

Michael Bradley’s article on political trade unionism (February SR) raised important issues about how socialists in workplaces and union branches can relate to current community political campaigns. He showed how and why campaigns can be brought into the workplace to help in the process of rebuilding rank and file confidence and organisation. This might then assist in building workplace resistance both to immediate employer attacks and against the wider Tory assault.

Shaker Aamer, the last British detainee in the world’s most notorious prison camp, Guantanamo Bay, has seen his release delayed once again as Socialist Review went to press.

President Obama gave the statutory 30-day notice to Congress of Shaker’s release on 25 September, so he should have returned around 25 October — his 5,000th day in captivity.

Of the 16 detainees previously released to the UK several others also had their returns delayed. Serious questions must now be asked.

The name Irène Némirovsky only sprang into public consciousness in Britain during the past decade. In France during the 1930s she was an established, critically acclaimed writer of 11 successful novels. Némirovsky was of bourgeois Russian Jewish background, her family having fled Kiev during the 1917 revolution to settle in Paris.

From attempts to wreck the welfare state to doctored progress reports on its brutal occupation of Afghanistan, it faces increasing examination.

A weak and barely united establishment maintains a public posture which asserts shared cultural references of "British decency" and "democratic values" to confirm that "we're all in it together". However it is now all starting to unravel.

Renato Guttuso (1912-87) "The Massacre", 1943. Oil on canvas, 59 x 73 cm. Raccolta Alberto Della Ragione, Florence

Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism are often seen as the junior partners of German Nazism. This compelling new exhibition of Italian resistance art, mainly from the 1930s and 1940s, vividly explores the arrogance and vanities of the Il Duce leadership cult and its savage outcomes.

Francis Beckett is an angry man - and no surprise. As a child of the immediate post-war generation - the so-called baby boomers - he benefited immensely from the Attlee and Wilson periods of social democratic reform.

Two linked exhibitions currently running at London's National Portrait Gallery - The Indian Portrait 1560-1860 and Contemporary Connections: the Singh Twins - generate much sharp comparison and contrasts.

The so-called "war on terror" is in reality a war of terror, and the Labour government has been intimately caught up in this. It tried to cover this up. It does not read well for a party that wants to present itself on voting day as enlightened, law abiding and anti-racist and as having, in Robin Cook's words, "an ethical foreign policy".