The Tories introduced the 50% strike ballot threshold to make industrial action harder. MATT WRACK argues that a Labour government has no justification for leaving it on the statute book
AS usual, while the Tory conference in Manchester had a backdrop of very serious issues for working people, it wasn’t itself a serious occasion. It was essentially a large gathering of lobbyists, looking for sinecures and contracts.
While attacks on the “woke” peppered the conference, this too has become a joke term, used to signify anything Tories don’t like, which is most things apart from profit and exploitation.
Boris Johnson’s speech on the last day was no exception, best characterised as not very good light entertainment, containing lines like “Hereward the Woke.”
The selection, analysis and interpretation of historical ‘facts’ always takes place within a paradigm, a model of how the world works. That’s why history is always a battleground, declares the Marx Memorial Library
It’s not just the Starmer regime: the workers of Britain have always faced legal affronts on their right to assemble and dissent, and the Labour Party especially has meddled with our freedoms from its earliest days, writes KEITH FLETT
Who you ask and how you ask matter, as does why you are asking — the history of opinion polls shows they are as much about creating opinions as they are about recording them, writes socialist historian KEITH FLETT
The summer saw the co-founders of modern communism travelling from Ramsgate to Neuenahr to Scotland in search of good weather, good health and good newspapers in the reading rooms, writes KEITH FLETT


