Politics

For a few days in Manchester last weekend, there was a utopia. The World Transformed conference of British socialists had taken over Hulme – the once rough but now bohemian part of the city – and in the middle of it all, at the Community Garden Centre, a collectivist’s dream was established. All day comrades sat there in the sun on the edges of flower beds and on picnic benches, having doctrinal debates, eating vegan food, reading homemade pamphlets. The garden centre was the conference’s locus, where attendees mixed joyfully between workshops and discussions away from the horrors of the real world. ‘Comrades have done an awful lot of work

As the dust settles on Israel’s phased withdrawal from Gaza under Donald Trump’s hard-won ceasefire deal, Hamas has slithered straight back into the void. Barely hours after the ink dried on ‘phase one’ of Trump’s plan, the Islamist rulers of Gaza unleashed a wave of reprisals against rival Palestinian clans. Accusations of ‘collaboration’ with Israel, or simple refusal to bow to Hamas’s rule, have triggered executions, abductions and what survivors are calling outright massacres. Instead of rebuilding, Gaza is now witnessing a purge. The message is clear: anyone who worked against Hamas during the war will pay for it now. In Gaza City, fierce clashes have erupted between Hamas and

The Greens are having quite a moment. Since the anointing of Zack Polanski as leader of the party, there’s been a 45 per cent increase in the membership, which is now up to about a hundred thousand believers. The party is also doing very well, comparatively speaking, in opinion polling, reaching about 15 per cent, not very far behind the Tories. The Polanski surge has come courtesy of a Corbyn-esque policy blitz But while the Greens are keen to talk up their polling success and growing membership – which is, naturally, good for party coffers – it won’t necessarily correlate to wider electoral success. We’ve been here before: during Jeremy

Defenders of free expression can breathe a collective sigh of relief. Hamit Coskun – the man who burnt a Quran outside the Turkish Consulate in London in February and was found guilty of a ‘religiously aggravated public order offence’ – had his conviction overturned at Southwark Crown Court on Friday. People are still scared to blaspheme against Islam. We already live under unofficial blasphemy laws enforced by fear Coskun exercised his freedom of conscience and felt the iron fist of the law. His original trial even bordered on victim-blaming. The fact that he was attacked on the street by a Muslim man wielding a knife was effectively used against him,

A political party widely referred to as ‘the Tories’ has now existed – albeit with some rather serious discontinuities along the way – for just short of 350 years. The rise of Reform and apparently terminal decline of the Tories in the polls, Kemi Badenoch’s widely praised conference speech notwithstanding, has, however, made many start to think the hitherto unthinkable. Might the world’s oldest political party finally be on its way out? Could the Tories cease to be? The Tories’ current woes certainly appear to constitute their lowest ebb since 1906 or 1846, or even the mid-18th century The Tories’ current woes certainly appear to constitute their lowest ebb since