Fownhope’s Heart of Oak Society traces its roots to the age of friendly societies, when communities provided their own safety net. Its anniversary celebrations reveal a tradition still very much alive, says MARK SEDDON
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The Mulliez family – and their communist confrontation
SOLOMON HUGHES exposes the chancers behind Sitel, the ‘inadequate’ firm that won a contract for Britain’s contact-tracing system
Sitel call centre at the Maxim Business Park near Motherwell, North Lanarkshire
ANGUS REID explains the significance of Cuba’s egalitarian in letter and spirit Family Code and the pertinent lessons it holds for democracies anywhere in the world
Special report by PEOPLE’S WORLD
NICK WRIGHT considers how the isolation of Israel and a new film on the controversial Italian communist leader are creating new reference points for Italy’s left
CARLOS MARTINEZ says Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are startling, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak
AMNON BROWNFIELD STEIN reports that far-right MPs who mobbed the event organised by Hadash may have helped raise awareness of the brutality of the Israeli right
TWO big lessons of the Covid-19 crisis come together as one: first, our government wants to take healthcare out of public hands when it can and hand it over to rich people and their corporations — including, it turns out, French billionaires.
Second, the pandemic is exacerbating inequality by really grinding at the less well-off, while the super-rich take the opportunity to become the super-richer.
“Contact tracing” is a well-established response to disease outbreaks. Typically, public and local health officials “chase” a virus by interviewing infected people to find out who they have been in contract with.
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Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
The wealth of the super-rich grows by £35 million daily while our NHS and schools collapse — that’s why thousands of us will be gathering in London demanding that the billionaires foot the bill for the many crises they have caused, writes TYRONE SCOTT
SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests