Editor's Choice

Will Hutton and Andrew Adonis’s Saving Britain: How We Must Change To Prosper In Europe has bold ambitions, which, combined with its left-of-centre slant, distinguishes it from many in the burgeoning genre of books about Brexit. The book, published less than a year before Britain is scheduled to leave the EU, argues that Brexit is part of a project to create “Thatcherism in one country”, that we can and should stop it – and make profound changes in Britain.

Michael Chessum is the organiser of Another Europe Is Possible. He talked with Martin Thomas from Solidarity ahead of AEIP's conference on 8 December

Russian president Vladimir Putin's personal fortune is estimated at $40 billion, making him one of the richest men in Europe.

He owns vast holdings in three Russian oil companies which are concealed behind a vast network of offshore companies. The level of corruption over which he presides accounts for an enormous amount of Russia's GDP - putting half of the economy in the hands of various shades of criminal enterprise.

First part of a two-part article.

Part 2 here

As the First World War progressed, working-class people became more aware, and resentful, of those profiteering from their suffering. While men were wounded and died in the trenches, and men, women and children at home suffered appalling poverty, capitalists saw the war as an opportunity to make money. Poets addressed this with anger, mockery and wit. The three poems here were all published by anti-war labour movement newspaper The Herald a century ago in 1916.

Part 11 of Michael Johnson’s series on the life and politics of James Connolly. The rest of the series can be found here.

In March 1914, Asquith made his new and final proposal on Home Rule, putting forward a scheme whereby the Ulster counties could exclude themselves from the new Irish constitution. It was supposed to be a temporary exclusion, for six years, but a general election in the interim delivering a Tory majority could make it permanent.

“To forget is counter-revolutionary.”*

“If our resolution does not foresee any specific method of action for the vast diversity of eventualities,” said Jean Jaurès in urging the adoption of the famous anti-war resolution of the Second International at its special conference in Basel on November 24, 1912, “neither does it exclude any. It serves notice upon the governments, and it draws their attention clearly to the fact that [by war] they would easily create a revolutionary situation, yes, the most revolutionary situation imaginable.”

“Ireland occupies a position among the nations of the earth unique... in the possession of what is known as a physical force party — a party, that is to say, whose members are united upon no one point, and agreed upon no single principle, except the use of physical force as the sole means of settling the dispute between the people of this country and the governing power of Great Britain..."

James Connolly, Workers’ Republic, July 1899.

In the wake of discussions over antisemitism in the Labour Party and beyond we collate here a series of articles, new and old, on the topic of left antisemitism.

The current debate on left antisemitism and the Labour Party

During the 1980s, a lot of people who thought of themselves as Marxists [grew] indifferent or hostile to any project of building a Marxist organisation. This tribe, and it was quite an important component of the Labour left, marched or ambled, in so far as it expressed itself explicitly, under the idea: we will develop the influence of Marxism by promoting left-wing ideas in the existing broad labour movement, trade unions and Labour Party.