Issue 29
After years of paralysis, the British left regenerated itself in 2025. But as new alliances coalesce, we must find a way of combining grassroots energy with a pragmatic electoral strategy capable of blocking the far-right and implementing radical reform.
While many socialists are rightly repulsed by the misdeeds of the Starmer government, its tenure will come to an end soon enough. When it does, we must be ready to renew the Labour Party’s radical mission.
As Reform surges and we enter a ‘proto-fascist’ moment, it is vital that we reject both complacency and factionalism, and work out how to build a powerful leftist counter-movement — in parliament and beyond.
At the end of a politically hectic year, the Green Party under Zack Polanski is one of the few genuine success stories on the British left. How much potential is there in a future Red-Green alliance?
To ensure that any future socialist government is not undermined by the British establishment as soon as it enters office, we need to build up wider structures of social power capable of sustaining it.
Despite his apparent respect for so-called liberal norms, Keir Starmer is likely to go down as one of the most authoritarian prime ministers in modern history. Is he trying to eradicate popular dissent entirely?
As a floundering Labour government continues to sneer that it prefers ‘power’ to ‘protest’, we should remember that direct action has always been an important adjunct to party politics — and that, in an essential sense, protest is power.
The release of a Reform football shirt this summer was a depressing sign of how effectively the Right has colonised working-class popular culture. Now the Left must fight back with a determined cultural strategy of its own.
Despite their apparently progressive credentials, many leading lights of the music industry have been equivocal at best when it comes to opposing the genocide in Palestine. What are they playing at?
At the tail end of the 1960s, the Merseyside Women’s Liberation Movement was founded in a modest flat in the Liverpool 8 area. Its subsequent rich history offers a vital corrective to clichéd, male-dominated accounts of regionalism.
Nearly thirty years ago, a young barrister called Keir Starmer defended a group of activists after they damaged armaments destined for a brutal war in Asia. Why is a Starmer-led government now cracking down on similar protests?
Though not inherently political spaces, pubs have always been breeding grounds for political dissent. Nowhere is this more true than in Dublin, where pints have provided liquid inspiration for countless radicals through the ages.
Set against the backdrop of occupied Korea in the 1920s and 1930s, a newly translated book updates the nineteenth-century educational workers’ novel to punchy and defiantly unsubtle effect.
Leftists seeking to change the world are increasingly also trying to change themselves via self-help frameworks for emotional and romantic improvement. But is this variety of literature more symptom than cure?
The Shonandai Cultural Centre in Japan is public architecture with the space to dream. A new book recounts the ways in which it offers a corrective to the ‘fun’ architecture New Labour hoped would regenerate British cities.
Liverpool writer Jeff Young has attracted a dedicated readership in recent years, following publication of two books that powerfully and hypnotically catalogue late-1970s Europe and his native Merseyside over the last few decades.