Two events piqued my interests in politics and world affairs before I entered the anti-war movement and embarked on a political expedition across the left. They were the razing of Grozny by the Russian Federation and the anti World Trade [...]
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In great political moments there are certain images etched into the mass psyche. The man standing in front of a tank column at Tiananmen Square, the throngs at Tahrir Square as the Mubarak dictatorship fell, the fall of the Berlin [...]
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When she was a communist Sylvia Pankhurst wrote that “he only school we learn at is history” and since 1920 we have had a lot to learn. The Soviet Union and its satrapies fell into barbarism and were eventually dissolved [...]
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It is hard to believe that it is possible for the far left to secrete a worse image of itself than it is at present. When we’re not having exposés in the papers of inept Trotskyists and cranks infesting the [...]
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What will be left of Syria this time next year? Already so many of its people have fled or have been slaughtered. Already its infrastructure, its treasures and wealth have been obliterated. Fighting over the rubble in Aleppo, Dara’a and [...]
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It is not a good time to be sick, disabled, young, low paid or a single parent in Britain. The new Tory government wasted no time in utilising its shock election win and the mandate they achieved for severe cuts [...]
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Europe. The very word conjures up pictures of unelected bureaucrats and no-mark politicians sitting in a distant parliament passing laws on how much a banana can bend and imposing dodgy things like human rights on us. The European Union (EU) [...]
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“A train which is due to leave at eight will normally leave at any time between nine and ten, but perhaps once a week, thanks to some private whim of the engine-driver, it leaves at half past seven.” George Orwell, [...]
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There was a time, just over a decade ago, when the leaders of the United States and Britain promised the world a quick victory in Iraq in order to put an end to an unhinged dictator, halt the Islamist threat [...]
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Iraq does not exist. Syria does not exist. The carve up of the Ottoman Empire by the entente powers in 1916 is all but undone. The president of the Kurdish Regional Government Masoud Barzani has said a “new reality” now [...]
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