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IAN LAVERY MP warns that decades of neoliberal policies have left former industrial communities behind — but a renewed Labour commitment to working people could change the political landscape
Titanic notes from a mighty quartet pay fitting tribute
Chris Searle on jazz
PAOLO SANTALUCIA reports on how an Italian region defies US pressure to end a Cuban doctors programme
HENRY FOWLER outlines the GFTU’s new 2026-27 education programme and argues that investing in trade union education is essential to building worker power, developing leaders and strengthening collective action
We need a government that invests in saving lives not destroying them, argues SOPHIE BOLT
More expensive by weight than gold, saffron is surprisingly simple to grow. MAT COWARD explains
The public inquiry is the result of more than a decade of determined campaigning. Now, those who fought for justice want the full story of government involvement and police conduct to be told, says KATE FLANNERY
The Durham Miners’ Gala is a celebration of working-class culture, but also a call to action — to rebuild workers’ collective strength, says KIM JOHNSON MP
WHEN the Die Like a Dog Quartet was first convened in 1993, it was 23 years after the death of the dedicatee of the foursome’s first album, Albert Ayler, whose lifeless body had been recovered from New York’s East River in November 1970.
They were a unique quartet, whom half a century earlier would have been cast as fervent enemies: a German tenor saxophonist, Peter Brotzmann (pictured, top far left), born in Remscheid in 1941; a Japanese trumpeter who specialised in electronic sonics, Toshinori Kondo, who was born in 1948 in Ehime and educated at Kyoto University, and two African Americans, drummer Hamid Drake, born in the South in Monroe, Louisiana in 1955, and northerner William Parker (pictured, top middle), virtuoso bass player born in the Bronx in 1952.
These musicians had travelled many different roads before their eventual rendezvous and amalgam in Charlottenburg, Berlin, to cut a record for the Free Music Productions label, and now how their sounds, always singular and rampant, found a new unity and astonishing dynamism.
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