Nine years after Grenfell, Kensington & Chelsea council hasn’t learned a thing

MY 20 years’ service as a councillor at “the Grenfell Council” ended on May 7. I could no longer bear to be seen as complicit with the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Council’s ongoing failu...

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Reform UK: Farage’s Phoney Pitch to the Working Class

NIGEL FARAGE has invited trade union leaders to attend Reform UK’s annual conference and claims he will lay out routes for unions to affiliate to his party. Reform, he insists, is now “the party of th...

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‘Opportunities in politics’ – how lobbyists tell ministers who to meet

Pivot from Mandelson: the advice from Global CounselA TOP consultant from Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm Global Counsel suggested Business Secretary Peter Kyle was acting too like Peter Mandelson and...

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Military spending isn’t the path to security — in the Green Party we take a longer view

MY INTRODUCTION to politics came in 2003, when I marched against the Iraq war alongside a million people in Britain and 36 million others around the world.The anti-war movement was right. The war was ...

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We must not lose revolutionary Cuba

TINY CUBA — the Jewel of the Caribbean, the Isle of Freedom, the Beacon for the Oppressed — is clinging by a thread to its independence and its vision.Revolutionary Cuba — defiant of the world’s most ...

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Call for evidence: the Labour Together Parliament

SHADOW World Investigations (SWI) and Paul Holden, author of The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy, are today announcing a new investigative project about the t...

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The Mladenov distraction: behind the screen, Netanyahu is annexing Gaza step-by-step

GAZA requires urgent international attention.What is happening in the besieged and devastated Strip at the moment by far exceeds an unfolding humanitarian disaster; it is a calculated geopolitical res...

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Chery in Sunderland: why co-operation with China is in British workers’ interests

THE Sunderland car plant is the largest of its kind in Britain. It employs 6,000 people directly, supports tens of thousands more in its supply chain, and is one of the few remaining anchors of high-q...

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The far right turns crime into culture war

WHAT do those protesting long and loud about the police handling of Henry Nowak’s murder actually want?After all, the murderer, Vickrum Digwa, has now been convicted and will serve more than 20 years ...

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Peace is a trade union issue

SOMETIMES members in the union say to me, “Fran — why is PCS commenting on Palestine or Iran or Ukraine? Focus on the members.”I say this: “Because it’s the right thing to do so. Injustice has to be c...

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Kanya King CBE – she built the stage the industry refused to

KANYA KING CBE died on June 3 2026. She died peacefully, surrounded by her family and close friends, after a courageous battle with colon cancer. She was 62 years old.She should have had decades more....

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Fresh strikes threaten ceasefire and peace talks

THE Committee for the Defence of Iranian People’s Rights (Codir) has issued a warning that the exchange of missile strikes between Israel and Iran could result in a dangerous escalation of the conflic...

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Silencing dissent in Portsmouth

SINCE being first elected in 2017, Portsmouth South MP Stephen Morgan has shown little tolerance for those who disagree with or challenge him.On and off for more than a year, pro-Palestine activists w...

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Britain faces a climate reckoning

EXTREME weather with fires in the summer and floods in the winter, food shortages, with harvests failing every other year, poor health and growing poverty are all consequences of the climate crisis th...

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Class war by other means: the Milburn review and the neoliberal assault on disabled youth

THE publication of the interim report of the Milburn review into young people and work represents a sinister milestone in the ongoing neoliberal assault on the British welfare state.

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European protest targets rearmament drive

FACED with mounting military expenditure in Europe, cuts in social spending to finance it, and political attempts to whip up war fever spreading across Europe to justify it, a major European internati...

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Banners, brass bands and a 150-year legacy

THIS year marks the 150th anniversary of the Fownhope Heart of Oak Society, rooted — excuse the pun — in that very fine tradition of friendly societies, an early collectivism that protected people in ...

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When progressive ideas elsewhere take a beating Cuba’s revolution keeps evolving

IN 2019, after a new constitution was approved by an overwhelming majority public vote, the Cuban government legalised independent international co-production for the first time. In 2022 I took two ca...

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Culture and the class war in Italy — from the Venice Biennale to Berlinguer’s legacy

GIORGIA MELONI’S demand for an apology from Israel after Italian Palestinian solidarity activists were arrested on the multi-nation Gaza aid flotilla is a breach in the European Union’s wall of suppor...

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Siege socialism or barbarism: why we must stand with Cuba

A FEW weeks ago, Donald Trump told reporters that he expects the Cuban government to be gone by the end of the year. He called Cuba “a failed country” and added: “Other presidents have looked at this ...

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Knesset conference on settler violence is itself violently disrupted

LIKUD and other nationalist members of the Knesset violently disrupted a parliamentary conference organised by Hadash’s communist lawmakers against ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities — only t...

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A new McCarthyism? The US threat to Cuba solidarity groups

FEDERAL investigators at the Justice and Treasury Departments have reportedly launched a sweeping inquiry into Cuba solidarity organisations, raising the danger of a revival of McCarthyite tactics to ...

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The tale of two Cedrics: the CEO, the GMB and the pig that upset British Gas

WHEN British Gas held its AGM in London on May 31 1995, its top boss, Cedric Brown, faced an unusual protest. Members of the GMB union had engaged the services of a 20-stone saddleback sow named Cedri...

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The Palestine solidarity industry

IT ALL started with a call to my family in a displacement camp in northern Gaza.Since internet lines rarely stay connected, I managed to send a message to the widow of my cousin, who was killed along ...

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Hands off Raul Castro!

RAUL CASTRO was born on this day in the small Cuban village of Biran in Holguin Province in 1931.If there was ever a time when we needed to celebrate the life and contribution of this heroic revolutio...

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Trade union renewal will not be delivered by Parliament alone

TRADE unionists have every reason to welcome the new Employment Rights Act 2025. After years of anti-union legislation, restrictions on industrial action and attacks on workplace rights, measures that...

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Vietnam’s economic transformation reaches a turning point

THE country’s upgrade to secondary emerging market status, coupled with regional-leading macroeconomic growth and deep institutional reforms, is unlocking large-scale opportunities for international i...

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Rally now to stop Europe’s leaders driving us to war

WAR-DRIVEN austerity is a storm about to hit Europe. Indeed, the first gales are already blowing through the political system.Energy prices are due to rise 13 per cent this autumn, a rise directly cau...

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Congo’s deadly perfect storm

THE people of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have long had to contend with the forces of neocolonialism staging coups, assassinating its popular leader, fomenting conflicts and stealing the re...

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Firm rebuttal of US meddling

IN THE past six weeks hostile pressure against Mexico from Washington has increased significantly, with a combination of lawfare and covert action.The first public information indicating such action e...

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