Over summer 2020, there was a brief period when the government actually appeared to acknowledge Article 25 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines the right to housing. Rough sleeping was virtually eliminated overnight, and evictions were...
Protestors at Kill the Bill demonstrations, credit: Subject Access Sarah Everard’s death, allegedly at the hands of an off-duty officer, and the violent police response to protestors in Clapham Common and Bristol over the past two weeks, have...
Alliance for Choice activists protest outside Stormont. Credit: Emma Campbell Northern Ireland has finally emerged from the shadow of a British law that wreaked untold misery on the island of Ireland. On 22 October 2019, tired but buoyed, we celebrated that people...
This has certainly been a year of contrasts. The government has been criticised for its response to the coronavirus crisis, a new wave of Black Lives Matter protests has led to a wider discussion of systemic racism, and I have become a regular columnist at Red Pepper...
From the report Feminise Politics Now! Municipalism means transforming how power is distributed in our societies. Our strategies question how politics is done, what political institutions do and who runs them. If we want to reclaim politics for common people, we must...
Barricade at the corner of Boulevard Voltaire and Boulevard Richard-Lenoir during the Paris Commune of 1871 In March 1871, as the second French empire disintegrated, women, workers, and members of the National Guard (a citizen neighbourhood militia) of Paris erected...
Protests in 1990. Photo: Wellcome Images When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the British left was wrong-footed. Despite many British left groups not being particularly supportive of the USSR, the process of seeing the Soviet bloc collapse between 1989 and 1991...
A protester wears a panuelo verde. Credit: Daniel Espinosa Guzman The ‘estallido social’ (social explosion) that kicked off in October 2019 was the largest outpouring of discontent witnessed in Chile since the Pinochet era. While the initial protests were sparked by a...
Have we entered an age of post-truth politics? Can anything stop the spread of conspiracy theories and fake news? Facts, statistics and official figures are becoming an increasingly fragile foundation for democratic politics around the world. But this decay is...
A train arrives in Khartoum from Atbra city in August, 2019, two days before the final signing of the Draft Constitutional Declaration. Photo by Osama Elfaki The second wave of revolts in the Middle East and North Africa (the ‘MENA’ region) began in Sudan, in December...
(Image: William McCue) At the start of this year, the UK government released a report advising local authorities to ‘bring forward democracy’. Citizen involvement comes too late in the planning process, it said, and there is ‘unacceptable uncertainty’ built into it,...
Image: Uta Scholl Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors is a book that does not lend itself to easy categorisation. It is at once a brutal depiction of working-class struggle and strength, a guide to breaking capitalism’s furtive grip on our lives, and a wake-up call...