Dawn Foster is a Jacobin staff writer, a columnist for the Guardian, and the author of Lean Out.
Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has seized on an absurd charge of antisemitism to dismiss his former leadership rival, Rebecca Long-Bailey, from the shadow cabinet. It’s the latest indication that Starmer is steering the party even harder to the right than had been feared.
Boris Johnson has learned a trick from David Cameron: no matter how badly a member of the government misbehaves, ignore demands for their resignation and wait until the press loses interest. So far, the strategy is working for him in the current Dominic Cummings scandal — but his luck might run out.
The UK’s Boris Johnson had been coasting through the COVID-19 crisis — but that was before his aide Dominic Cummings’s flouting of social-distancing rules set off a nationwide furor. It’s reminded the country of everything they hate about the Tories: their privileged obliviousness and their belief that normal rules don’t apply to them.
Recent developments in the Labour Party have many socialists wondering if they should give up on the party for good. That would be a disaster. Leftists should stay in the party and focus on building power at the local level.
A decade of Tory austerity, now compounded by the COVID-19 crisis, is pushing Britain’s National Health Service to a breaking point.
Britney Spears called for a general strike and wealth redistribution in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Therefore we are legally obliged to publish something about it.
Boris Johnson has always fantasized about being his generation’s Winston Churchill. With his destructive bungling of the response to the coronavirus crisis, he is shaping up to be the British George W. Bush.
The coronavirus is already exposing the profound damage a decade of Tory austerity has wrought on British society. And it’s about to get a lot worse.
As votes are counted in the Labour leadership election, the party faces a dangerous period: Keir Starmer, the favorite to win, is likely to try to drag the party back to the dark ages of top-down politics and centrist equivocating.
A new “Free Speech Union” established by right-wing trolls in Britain is just the latest self-promotion gambit by those who insist on their inalienable right to spew hate while remaining exempt from criticism.
Polls predict an earthquake result in today’s Irish election, as Sinn Féin threatens to beat the mainstream parties for the first time. It could bring a united Ireland closer — but it’s also a vote to stop the soaring cost of living.
Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has announced it will be renationalizing British train lines. It’s further proof that privatization is being discredited around the world.
Jess Phillips’s brief but disastrous bid for the Labour Party leadership is a cautionary tale for substanceless centrists in politics: just because pundits and TV hosts love you doesn’t mean anybody else will.
The anti-Catholic attacks on Labour leader candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey are a reminder that an old form of British bigotry never completely went away.
The Labour Party contest to replace Jeremy Corbyn as leader has so far featured confusion and acrimony. But the situation promises to improve as actual campaigning gets underway — and the position of socialists in the party remains infinitely stronger than it was before Corbyn.
Labour’s election debacle had multiple causes: a monolithically hostile media, the Brexit imbroglio, and unfocused messaging in the campaign’s final stretch. But for the hundreds of thousands of left-wing dues-payers who have joined the party — now the biggest in Europe — the mood is one of determination, not despair.
Pandering to ultranationalism, Boris Johnson is seeking to make it harder for the families of those murdered by British soldiers in Northern Ireland to pursue justice in the courts. It’s the latest escalation of the Tories’ hard-right turn on the question of how Britain should confront the legacy of the Troubles.
For Labour door-knockers, defeat was bitter, but the experience built skills and solidarities that will carry them into the next fights: preserving Labour as a vehicle for socialism, battling austerity and despair at the local level, and preparing the ground for victory at the next election.
This election campaign has marked a grim milestone in British political history: a pathological liar in Downing Street, Boris Johnson, has run a campaign in which all standards of honesty and accuracy have been tossed aside — and a ferociously partisan media has done everything it can to cover it up.
There are only two real choices in the UK election — Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and Boris Johnson’s Tories. Comfortable liberals who claim to be “politically homeless” are exposing their cluelessness about the misery and havoc another Tory government will impose on ordinary Britons.