In this week's issue
- A new PM won’t save the UK from a far-right government, but building a grassroots societal coalition might
- Paul Rogers: Could Corbyn’s grassroots-led movement have the last laugh over Starmer?
- Why NHS data workers are demanding the healthcare system drop Palantir’s Federated Data Platform
- How the British establishment made Nigel Farage's far-right politics respectable
- Modern slavery victims urge UK government to guarantee their rights to support
- UK’s proposed Brit Card won’t curb immigration, but will subject ordinary citizens to mass surveillance and terrifying bureaucratic disenfranchisement
- UK government misses court-ordered deadline to compensate the families of 21 Nigerian coal miners murdered by British colonial police
- Plus: This week in history and what we’re reading
Of the hundreds of readers who responded to our poll last week, only 24% said they would vote Labour if Keir Starmer stepped down. But that is the bet that Labour must take, and hopefully its polling is far more representative than ours.
It is worth remembering that last week’s elections weren’t just about Labour losing thousands of seats, they were also about Reform UK winning thousands of seats. Just how has Nigel Farage’s latest political vehicle gone so mainstream so fast? I asked that question of Daniel Trilling, openDemocracy’s former commissioning editor and author of the new book, If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable. Read the interview, or listen to it as a podcast while you do the weekend laundry.
Retail politics takes up so much of our attention that we often mistake the symptoms (who will succeed Starmer?) for the malaise (what ails our politics?). This is something that I’ve tried to think through in my piece this week, where I argue that the next three years are an opportunity for us, as a society, to assert our democratic will.
