How far-Right are you?

A common form of classroom cruelty when I was at school involved a game we called “Contagion”. The instigator would touch the person next to them, having chosen a low-status scapegoat — usually “Holly”, who wore thick glasses and was …

How Labour can beat Truss

Tony Blair used to say that the worst thing about being in opposition was that you would wake up every morning thinking about what you wanted to say, while government ministers were waking up thinking about what they were going …

Does Manchester need the Tories?

“It’s just not something I talk about to people. It’s almost a heresy not to read The Guardian here.” Diane lives in Didsbury, one of Manchester’s most affluent suburbs. But even here, among the neatly pruned hedges, she feels isolated …

This is not a class war

Headlines scream about a looming “class war“; reports warn of an inevitable “summer of discontent”. Britain’s newspapers are trying their hardest to evoke the chaos of the winter of 1978-79, which, in the neoliberal fairy-tale version of history, marked the …