England Follow

Prepare for taxing times Get ready for a thumping council tax bill, unless we can force the government to back off. The value of every home in England is being reassessed to calculate new council tax rates.

Unite Against Fascism held a day of action in England and Wales last Saturday.

IN 1794 a huge public meeting gathered in Sheffield, swelled by thousands of local metal workers. The words "liberty, brotherhood and equality" — touchstones of the recent French Revolution — hung in the air. The purpose of the mass meeting was to link two causes that burned deeply in the souls of the English working class — for the reform of the corrupt and undemocratic parliamentary system, and for the "total and unqualified abolition of Negro slavery".

Activists were campaigning for Respect up and down England and Wales even before the general election was announced on Tuesday this week.

Jill Russell, Respect’s parliamentary candidate for Tyne Bridge constituency, took part in a question and answer session at a school recently in the north east of England.

Police in England are wrong to "dish out Asbos with their conflakes", Martyn Jones MP, the Labour chair of a Commons committee, said last week.

The View from Manchester, Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street, until 3 April Don McPhee’s exhibition The View from Manchester reflects the lives of ordinary people, encapsulating the world but focusing on the north west of England. What really struck me was the humanitarianism and compassion of his work.

I have been employed as a reserve delivery worker for two years at South Shields delivery office, north east England.

AROUND 150 activists from across the south west of England met in Exeter last Saturday to discuss how to build the Make Poverty History campaign. Constantino Casasbuenas, a policy adviser to Oxfam, opened the conference. He argued that the purpose of the campaign was to unite all those who could no longer tolerate the deaths of 30,000 children a day around the world from preventable illness.

Michael Tippett was, along with Benjamin Britten, one of the two great modern English composers of the post-war period. Not only did he compose some excellent operas, oratorios and symphonies, he was a man with political interests and social concerns.

In 1947 Britain lost control of India, the colony that British prime minister Disraeli had once called the "jewel in the crown of England".

I’M NOT particularly interested in league tables. But if you put Shakespeare to one side, Arthur Miller stands comparison with any playwright writing in the English language for his contribution to our culture and our understanding of what it is to be human. He uniquely captured the pain and the anguish, the hopes and aspirations of human beings in the modern world. And perhaps most importantly, he understood how human beings are connected to events in the greater world.