Algeria’s Islam Slimani challenges for the ball at AFCON 2013. Credit: Magharebia Algeria’s performance during the 2021 FIFA Arab Cup offers a number of interesting insights into the social and political context of the country itself. The tournament was won by a...
Red Pepper
Review: Always Red
Image via unitelive.org As a teenager, incensed by the half-wages paid to young workers on the Liverpool docks, Len McCluskey organised a successful strike among his fellow clerical workers to remedy the inequity. He was soon elected as shop steward, cancelling his...
Young, left and marginalised
Placard at Global Climate Strike in Germany, 2019. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash The final weekend of September 2021 saw the return of the long awaited left-wing political festival, The World Transformed (TWT). Labour’s left turned up in force, including MPs,...
New normal, old struggles
A watchtower overlooking the Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre (Credit: Gino Reyes) Ashish Ghadiali: You’ve said you don’t want to just go back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic. What has got to change? Sohail Daulatzai: Well, first off, you and I both know that ‘normal’ –...
Review: The Welsh Way: Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution
Image: Jonny Gios via Unsplash When the late Rhodri Morgan, as Labour’s First Minister of Wales, said that there was ‘clear red water’ between his administration and the Blair government in Westminster, he was attempting to put distance between the two countries and...
Perhaps winning over the general public is not worth all the effort
Photo: Rwendland If you told someone there was a sovereign nation where the only way the opposition party could apparently gain power was to win the approval of both the armed forces and the man who owned two of the biggest selling newspapers, they might reply, ‘Is it...
Review: Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
Image: Penguin Books Freedom is the beguiling yet nebulous concept at the core of a spate of recent publications. Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint muses on and revels in the word’s indeterminacy, while Olivia Laing’s Everybody: a Book...
The lasting legacy of Raymond Williams
Photo courtesy of the Raymond Williams Society 2021 marks the centenary of the birth of Raymond Williams, an important thinker and writer on the British left. Born in the village of Pandy on the Welsh border, he went on to study at Cambridge, fight in the second world...
Dawn Foster: a voice from the sharp end
Dawn Foster, who died suddenly at home in July, was so much more than a talented journalist. Raised in Newport, Wales, she was the rarest of public figures – a high-profile, working-class voice in Britain’s media landscape. On television and in print, Dawn was one of...
Cryptocurrencies: a view from the left
President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele, who accompanied his declaration that cryptocurrency would be recognised as legal tender in June by changing his Twitter profile pic to this version of himself with glowing laser eyes (Credit: Nayib Bukele) The use of...
Review: Our Time is Now: Sex, Race, Class and Caring for People and Planet
Selma James speaks in 2019. Image credit: ECP Sex, Race and Class is now in its third incarnation. A short pamphlet of the same title was originally published in 1974, and an anthology spanning a staggering seven decades of activism was published in 2012. Our Time is...
Stuart Delivery strike highlights UK’s bogus self-employment problem
A picket line in Sheffield on day 14 of the Stuart Delivery Workers strike. Photo: Alex Marshall Stuart Delivery couriers are now into their third week of strike action, in what has become the longest continuous strike in UK gig economy history. Action that begun in...