You hear that horrible grating sound? Like metal on metal, like the awful groan of a ship’s hull striking a solid object? Except louder. Much, much louder. Those are the tectonic plates of history grinding up against each other. Shifting, reconfiguring. …

Why the left must support Ukrainian resistance against invasion As Russian tanks and troops head into Ukraine in an attempt to seize the capital Kyiv, along with other major cities, anti-war demonstrators around the world are taking to the streets to express their solidarity with the Ukrainian people and their…

How are your hopes for the future these days? Are you hunkered down in bleak mid-winter, or is there something stirring within you, something stirring and striving towards the light of spring? If you asked me to give a sober assessment of the state of the planet, it would of…

Almost a year to the day after the assault on the US Capitol Building by an insurgent right-wing Trump-supporting mob, prospects for the continuation of US democracy — such as it is — after the Biden administration are looking bleak in the extreme. Not only have the main instigators of…

COP26 and the lessons for the left The 26 world climate summit (aka “Conference of the Parties”) COP26 has been and gone. In the runup, UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres set the bar for action high, by referring to the current crisis as “code red for humanity”, the moment when…

Two days before the German elections, 100,000 people demonstrate in Berlin in response to a call by the youth-led organisation Fridays For Future (FFF). For Germany as a whole, the figure is around 600,000 people. …

“Unless there are rapid, sustained and large-scale reductions of climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions, including CO2, methane and others, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C compared to pre-industrial levels, as enshrined in the Paris Agreement, will be beyond reach.” — UN Climate Change Secretariat In the light of…

By Mike Hembury, SOAPBOX Columnist for The Wild Word Magazine

In these days of pandemics and pandemonium, as our horizons shrink and our communities fragment, it can be hard to keep a grip on the real, hard to hold a bearing on the lodestar of transformative change that this world so desperately needs. How easy it is just to sink…