THOUSANDS OF school students have been agonising over their A level and GCSE results in the last two weeks. Last week's A level results were the best ever, with the number of young people getting grades A to E up 1.1 percent to 95.4 percent of all those who take the exams. This week's GCSE results were expected to show a similar trend.
The trial of 13 men accused of burning down the Yarls Wood detention centre ended last Friday with Group 4 being condemned by all
Not so long ago the right wing press and the police tried to ban the Notting Hill Carnival. When all else failed, they physically attacked it. From its beginning they have hated it because it is a symbol of black resistance and black and white solidarity. The Notting Hill Carnival survived because of the resistance by black, and many white, people. The carnival was a response to the vicious race riots in August 1958.
I grew up in Dominica in the West Indies and came here in 1960. You couldn't miss the discrimination. People told you to get back where you come from, but not so polite. You couldn't get a job. I spent two years out of work. Then Harold Wilson brought in a law saying everywhere employing a certain amount of people had to have ten of the workforce non-white. This opened doors for us.
Your book gives a devastating account of Blair's previous wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. What would you say to those who claim they were a success?
Allan Leighton, the chairman of Royal Mail, combines a readiness to spout management theory bollocks with a steely readiness to wage class war. One minute he is like David Brent, the boss played by Ricky Gervais in the TV series The Office. The next minute he is a hard-faced axeman.
Poetry offers many ways of looking at the world, investigating it, and presenting the findings to the rest of us. In schools and colleges, more often than not it's a way of testing and grading children and students. This means it becomes a way of convincing people that they don't know as much as they should.
Tony Blair's government is now the longest serving Labour administration. The media has made many comparisons between Blair and Clement Attlee, leader of the 1945-51 Labour government. For many in the Labour Party the achievements of the Attlee government, with its creation of the welfare state and nationalisation of key parts of industry, are the high points of the party.
Diane Diane is a community nurse at a health centre in west London. She has a young daughter
Over the last few months there has been a barrage of headlines about black people and crime.The tragic shooting of two young women in Birmingham at new year led to an outpouring of grief and a moral panic about gun crime. Politicians queued up to tell us that rap music was the cause of the problem. But the whole idea of black on black crime has been falsely created by the police.
NO SANE person could be unmoved by the terrible suffering of people in the West African state of Liberia. Fourteen years of brutal civil war has seen at least 200,000 people killed out of a population of three million. Many others have been injured or lost their homes.
GLASGOW IS a city with a rich socialist tradition. The roots of its reputation go back to the First World War when the Red Clyde was part of a great wave of working class revolt that swept Europe. The impact of the war made munitions centres like Glasgow fertile territory for labour unrest and socialist agitation. It produced many fine working class fighters, including Britain's greatest anti-war socialist, John Maclean.
