Latest editorial
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
Tubthumping at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival: poetry driven by politics
Last Saturday GREG FREEMAN thoroughly enjoyed a Well Versed poetry bash at the Mascara bar in London before learning about the terror attack
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
IT WAS when the train was leaving Waterloo that news of the London Bridge terror attacks started appearing on people’s mobiles. I had to leave early to catch the last train home after attending Tubthumping, an evening of political poetry at the Stoke Newington literary festival in north London.
Whatever conclusions some may draw, these terrible, crazed happenings make politics irrelevant, for the moment — and that is why the parties more or less suspended election campaigning, briefly, in the aftermath. And that’s also why the most important poem performed on the night at the Mascara Bar in Stoke Newington in retrospect became Jess Green’s Friday Night, which she wrote within two days of the Paris attacks of November 2015.
It includes these lines: “Because Friday nights are made for laughter … nobody told the kids at that gig they were going to war … Friday nights are sacred.”
Similar stories
ALAN MORRISON welcomes a new collection from the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time
ALAN MORRISON recommends a consummate, heart-warming collection about a working-class upbringing in the industrial north-east
RUTH AYLETT reviews two collections of outright political poetry
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician