Michal Burawoy’s Public Sociology cover art It is unusual to read a book written by someone who was your close neighbour when growing up. Michael Burawoy was our ‘next door but one’ neighbour in a lower middle-class street in south Manchester. Later, doing maths at...
Red Pepper
Sutton Community Farm and the politics of community agriculture
Photo provided by Sutton Community Farm The UK farming sector is in the middle of an existential crisis. As a consequence of leaving the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, the Conservative government has had to draft a new agricultural support scheme to either match or...
Christmas gift subscriptions – on sale now!
Not sure what to get that special lefty in your life this festive season? Want to support independent media? Look no further! The Red Pepper Christmas gift bundle includes… our latest issue, ‘Deluge and Drought’ an annual subscription for 2023 (four more issues!) the...
Power in unions
Emergency Workplace Organising Committee graphic (Credit: EWOC) At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, tens of millions of US workers were confronted with more dangerous conditions at work. They were called essential but in many cases were treated as expendable....
After Holden, how many more kids will Britain send to war?
For Irish unity march, London 1979. Photo credit: Gillfoto David Holden didn’t intend to kill Aidan McAnespie, but he did fantasise about doing it. While fondling a general-purpose machine gun, aiming it at McAnespie and pulling the trigger, Holden fantasised about...
Can’t pay, don’t pay
Photo: EE Image Database (licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0) This article first appeared in Issue #237, ‘Power in Unions’, published September 2022. Subscribe today to read more articles and support independent media. The energy price hikes we’re all facing aren’t...
Resistance in Leicester’s garment district
The South Indian thali we had for lunch that day was exceptional. It had been one of the first sunny, bright blue sky days of the year and as we drove through Evington and Highfields even the ‘dark factories’ glistened. Along East Park Road, Vaisakhi decorations wove...
Never give up: remembering Anwar Ditta
Sketch and poster of Anwar Ditta by Mukhtar Dar Anwar Ditta was a British-Pakistani woman who fought – and won – a case against the Home Office after it refused entry to her three children, leaving them stuck without her in Pakistan. Her treatment at the hands of the...
Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson – Review
A lithium mine in Chile. Lithium is a vital component of many ostensibly ‘green’ technologies About two-thirds of the way through Volt Rush, Henry Sanderson interrupts his description of the pack of corporate scavengers picking over central Africa’s copper belt to...
Cinema on the move
The Order of Things (2017) At the London Migration Film Festival (LMFF), we have found that people most commonly associate the term ‘migration’ with politics and tragedy. For example, when we approached a new venue with the hopes of holding screenings there during the...
Tunisia’s struggle for energy democracy
A wind turbine farm in Tunisia (Credit: Dana Smillie) Since the 2011 revolution Tunisian governments have consistently failed to implement progressive public sector reforms and succumbed instead to the demands of global institutions such as the IMF. The Société...
A new Italian era
Giorgia Meloni speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference The greatest tragedy of the far-right’s victory in the Italian general election was its inevitability. Italian electoral law favours coalitions of parties. More than a third of Parliament is...