British Labour Party

Boris Johnson caricature

Britain’s impressively dishonest and disorganised right-wing Prime Minister Boris Johnson is leaving office, and just about everybody is pleased to see the back of him, writes Derek Wall.

At the end of October, Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from the British Labour Party, writes Jonathan Strauss. What Corbyn does next is a topic of discussion in and outside the party.

The British Labour Party has promised to “kick-start a housing revolution” as it unveiled its election manifesto, including commitments that would bring about Britain’s biggest public housing construction program for decades.

Following the European Union’s agreement to grant Boris Johnson’s government until next January to exit the EU, the House of Commons voted to hold a snap election on December 12. At the time of writing the election bill has yet to pass the House of Lords, but looks a certainty.

Politics in Britain is in turmoil. An early election will most likely happen as soon as December, or at the latest within a few months — the second early election since 2017.

This election will pit the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party against various parties representing the interests of the 1%, including the governing Conservative party (Tories), the Liberal Democrats and the recently-formed, far right, Brexit Party.

With only a few hours’ notice, thousands of people filled London’s Parliament Square on August 28 to protest against British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plan to shut down parliament for several weeks ahead of the Brexit deadline on October 31.

The shutdown is aimed at undermining attempts by MPs to prevent a No-Deal Brexit, or attempts to move a motion of no confidence in Johnson’s leadership.

Chanting “You shut down the parliament, we shut down the streets”, more than 10,000 protesters blocked main thoroughfares around parliament for several hours.

Though Boris Johnson was swept to power with apparent ease in the leadership election, deep divisions in parliament and the British public at large mean that delivering his three promises “deliver Brexit, unite the country and defeat Jeremy Corbyn“ will be a great challenge, writes John Lawrence.

Following Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson’s appointment as British Prime Minister, commentators are predicting a general election, possibly as early as October.

While a victory for Labour is far from certain, as it drops in the polls, Jonathan Cook writes that powerful forces are at work to ensure that Jeremy Corbyn — still the most popular Labour politician — never gets the chance to govern.

At the moment there is only one real mass movement in Britain — the one which got 700,000 people onto the streets of London in October last year calling for a new referendum. Labour should be leading it rather than be perceived as equivocating about it, writes Liam McQuade.

In a strikingly different stance to leaders of the Australian Labor Party, which has backed the Coalition government’s support for the illegitimate coup “government” in Venezuela, several leading members of Britain’s Labour Party have rejected the US attempt at regime change in the oil-rich South American nation.

The British Labour Party took a radical, anti-austerity manifesto to last year’s general elections and, despite polls and media commentators expecting an unprecedented disaster, came close to winning, denying the ruling Conservatives a majority. Despite this success, attempts to attack and sabotage Labour’s socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the ranks that support his vision, have continued. Michael Calderbank takes a look at what took place and what it means for the party’s future.

Tory-supporting media have been portraying Britain’s socialist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as a Soviet fellow-traveller. Meanwhile, Hilary Wainwright notes, Labour’s shadow chancellor and close Corbyn ally sets out a vision that breaks with the old bureaucratic state model.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell can usually barely breathe a word about nationalisation without setting off a media frenzy, so it’s strange that his most interesting comments yet on the subject passed with so little comment.

In 1792, pioneering British feminist and social justice activist Mary Wollstonecroft wrote in The Rights of Women: “It is justice, not charity that is wanting in the world.”

Now, 226 years later, Labour has anchored that fundamental truth in its vision for international development: A World for the Many, Not the Few.

Ever since his unexpected rise to British Labour Party leader, veteran socialist MP Jeremy Corbyn has faced sustained attacks and smears from the media, Tories and the right-wing of his own party. But over the past month, the attacks have become an unprecedented avalanche.

In the middle of the harshest winter for more than a decade, Britain finds itself still gripped by the icy fingers of neoliberal austerity.

Delegates to the recent Labour Party conference in the English seaside town of Brighton seemed not to notice a video playing in the main entrance. The world’s third biggest arms manufacturer, BAe Systems, supplier to Saudi Arabia, was promoting its guns, bombs, missiles, naval ships and fighter aircraft.  

It seemed a perfidious symbol of a party in which millions of Britons now invest their political hopes. Once the preserve of Tony Blair, it is now led by Jeremy Corbyn, whose career has been very different and is rare in British establishment politics.

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