51 Articles by:
Tom Blackburn is a Tribune columnist. He is a founding editor of New Socialist and lives in Greater Manchester.
Twenty years ago, the far-right British National Party gained its first council seats in Burnley, Lancashire following a series of riots in Northern towns – a new book explores the lessons from their rise to prominence.
Keir Starmer’s Future Candidates Programme promises to bring ‘normal’ people into politics – but in reality, it is designed to produce handpicked MPs with no sense of connection to the party membership.
The Labour leadership’s ‘listening tour’ will do little to rebuild relationships with postindustrial communities – but it will provide plenty of opportunities to repeat right-wing attacks on the party’s progressive base.
Keir Starmer’s reshuffle of his top staff is an attempt to shift the blame for the party’s ongoing poor performance – but bringing in more Blair-era right-wingers will only make Labour’s problems worse.
GB News, which launches today, will be Britain’s most openly reactionary broadcaster – but it is just one part of a much broader effort to drag our media rightwards, most notably by placing political pressure on the BBC.
The latest relaunch of Labour’s centre-left has seen it contrast its own modernity with socialist ‘nostalgia’ – but the Blairites remain wedged in the 1990s, and are determined to take the party down memory lane.
Starmer’s response to last week’s election disaster has been to push further rightwards in messaging and personnel – a move that will make it even harder for Labour to articulate a progressive alternative.
The Labour leadership’s decision to lean on Peter Mandelson in Hartlepool is just the latest sign that it is running out of ideas – and instead turning to discredited establishment hacks to bail it out.
The Labour leadership’s efforts to appear more Royalist than the Tories is a symptom of their sycophantic politics – if you won’t utter a critical word about the royal family, you’re not serious about challenging power.
Allegations of corruption in the Caller Report are grim, but Labour’s failure to oppose the takeover of Liverpool by an equally corrupt Tory government threatens to plunge a left-wing heartland into years of right-wing policies.
The emerging generation is the most left-wing in decades, driven by a desire for fundamental social change – but while they flocked to Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer’s war against the Left has turned them away.
Elected on a promise to modernise France, Emmanuel Macron has revealed what the political centre looks like in practice – a war on workers, authoritarian demagogy and a further emboldening of the far-right.
Labour’s opposition to tax increases for major corporations isn’t popular or even good economics – but it is a signal that the days when the party challenged big business interests are over.
A new report from Tory MPs and a right-wing think tank recommends deregulation to fix the North’s ills – but turning things over to the market has never solved the region’s problems.
For Keir Starmer, scrapping the Community Organising Unit and attacking party democracy are part of a single project: to turn Labour back into a party of the establishment.
Before Covid-19, the Tories promised to ‘level up’ Britain’s post-industrial regions – but new research shows they have been hammered by the pandemic and government support has been thin on the ground.
Anneliese Dodds’ speech was not as bad as advertised – but it demonstrated the fundamental problem with Labour’s new leadership: it is more concerned with appearing respectable to elites than with representing popular interests.
When teachers called for schools to close in the interests of public health, Labour should have backed them. Instead, Starmer and the frontbench ignored trade unions – and got the issue dead wrong.
2020 has been a difficult year for the socialist movement, with significant defeats in many countries – but the Left’s answers to the crises we face remain far more compelling than any offered by the Right or Centre.
As the Labour leadership drives members out of the party and damages ties to trade unions, they have turned to wealthy donors to fill the funding gap – but so far the rich seem quite happy with the Tories.