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
JUNE 2021 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of the Specials single Ghost Town. It went on to spend three weeks at Number One in the charts in the summer of 1981.
Recorded in Leamington Spa and produced in Tottenham, the single is now part of social history capturing the disaffection and impact of the first years of the 1979 Thatcher government.
It has been re-released to mark the anniversary but its significance goes far wider than the music charts. It speaks to an experience of particularly younger people under a Tory government that is not so different in 2020 despite the passage of four decades.
KEITH FLETT looks at geographical roots of working-class activism in Britain
MAYER WAKEFIELD recommends a musical ‘love letter’ to black power activists of the 1970s
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


