After a period of disillusion and fracture, the Left urgently needs to come together again — channeling a new spirit of populist, anti-fascist militancy taking inspiration from the past.
Politics
Francesca Newton
Mosley’s Shadow
Recent clampdowns on protest under Starmer and Sunak extend a long-running war on the Left waged by the British state. Meanwhile, far-right forms of extremism are scandalously deemed low-risk ‘cultural nationalism’.
Juliano Fiori
On National Centrism
‘Starmerism’ has been defined by absence rather than a firm plan for government. Now the Labour leadership is tending towards passive acceptance of the nationalist spirit of the age.
Chris McLaughlin
As I Please: Spirit of 2025
Keir Starmer’s media cheerleaders said he would replicate the quiet radicalism of Clement Attlee once in power. But one year into an inactive, often inaudible Labour administration, comparisons with the 1945 government seem absurd.
Features
Ed McNally
Into the Abyss
In the landscape of contemporary European politics, our rulers seem increasingly intent on walking us towards catastrophe — an ‘eyes wide shut’ approach that badly misremembers the cautionary tales of the twentieth century.
Grace Blakeley
The War Economy
One of the few policy innovations of the current Labour government is a turn towards rearmament under a new ‘military Keynesianism’. This means more profits for weapons manufacturers — and more authority for capitalist states.
Peter Mitchell
After Captain Tom
The cultural memory of the Second World War has long been used to serve the interests of British conservatism. But now that the long post-war compact is over, has its meaning evaporated completely?
Charlie Lawrie and Tom Cowin
Revolutionary Nostalgia
The Right has co-opted historical common sense to sinister ends. In response, the Left must fight fire with fire by embracing its own radical traditions of collective story-making.
History
Elinor Taylor
Reclaiming the People’s War
Though it has recently become a byword for reactionary nostalgia, the Second World War was in certain crucial ways an extension of the ‘Red Decade’ of the 1930s. A modern anti-fascist Left must reclaim this inheritance — and avoid its shortcomings.
Mervyn Bennun
To Still Speak of Freedom
Seventy years ago, the Congress of the People was broken up by apartheid police while discussing the Freedom Charter, a vision for a just society. The document remains a guide for building a free South Africa today, writes Mervyn Bennun, one of the meeting’s participants.
Emily Coatman
Airbrushing the Ghettoes
From Eastern Europe to the Middle East, the legacy of the Holocaust has been used to denigrate left anti-fascism and promote the interests of ethno-nationalist establishments. But we should remember who really killed the ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’ of the Second World War.
Marcus Barnett
Partisans of the World
For many people who risked their lives to defeat Nazism, aiding the post-war movements against a dying but vicious colonialism was the next step in the fight to realise their anti-fascist ideals.
Culture
Fergal Kinney
Laissez-Faire Listening
The Swedish tech giant has rigged the music industry against artists, mined listeners for data, and made music boring for everyone. Or is that just what the major recording labels want you to believe?
Owen Hatherley
Acid Japonisme
Visionary Japanese sci-fi author Izumi Suzuki anticipated our present malaise decades ago, in writing that combines melancholy for the failure of sixties radicalism with scepticism about a world of ubiquitous screens.
Jennifer Jasmine White
Party Poetics
The new poetry collection by London writer Caleb Femi is a modern epic based on the institution of the ‘shoobs’ (or house party) and its under-explored experimental potential.
Stephanie Phillips
Black Britain Beyond the Capital
British publishing has been slow to document black British stories outside of the capital. A new book, taking a road trip around the UK during the Thatcher years, sets the record straight.
