The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

Category: Articles

8 March – Women*’s Day History

This week in working class history


03/03/2026

Poster for Women's Day, March 8, 1914, demanding voting rights for women

8 March was not always on 8 March, but it was always from the working class: in 28 February 1909, the first unofficial “Women’s Day” took place in different US cities (drawing inspiration from the previous year’s March in New York), with large demonstrations organised by socialist women of the Socialist Party of America across the country, demanding the right to vote. 

A year later, in 1910, Clara Zetkin, Luise Zietz, and other comrades were at the Second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, proposing an International Working Women’s Day. The conference approved it, although with no fixed date, under the slogan “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism”. The vision came to life, and on 19 March 1911, the day was officially marked in Europe for the first time – Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Denmark saw over one million demonstrators take to the streets demanding the right to vote and for the end of gender discrimination in the workplace. 

The year 1917 is particularly important for Women*’s Day history: in Petrograd, Russia, tens of thousands of women working in textile factories led a strike starting on 8 March (23 February in the Julian calendar) and lasting several days. They demanded “bread for our children and the return of our husbands from the trenches” – or bread and peace for short, as it became known. It was the beginning of the February Revolution. 

In 1975, the United Nations celebrated International Women’s Day for the first time, formally recognising 8 March as an annual date through a resolution later on, in 1977. As the UN itself says on its website, “It is a day when women are recognised for their achievements” – dropping the “Working” from its name, and successfully co-opting the date to be globally welcomed by the feminist bourgeoisie with flowers and celebrations of femininity. 

However, not all is lost when it comes to grassroots transnational processes: since 2017, feminist groups, first in Argentina, then expanding elsewhere (with highlights to other Latin American countries, Poland and the Spanish State), organised around the idea of an International Women’s Strike (IWS), with clear anti-capitalist demands and achieving impressive global coordination, under the slogan “if women stop, the world stops”. Besides recentering the strike as a tool, it also reappropriated it and went beyond the classic sense of strike, to connect productive and reproductive labour. Because a large number of women work in precarious conditions, unable to exercise the right to strike, and because a lot of the work carried by women doesn’t stop at the labour market, but extends to the home, the feminist strike proposed four axes: labour strike, student strike, consumer strike, and care strike. 

Even if, in recent years, the concept of a feminist strike has lost some of its steam, reproductive labour and care work have been on the feminist agenda, highlighting the need for a feminism for the 99%. This year and all years, 8 March shouldn’t be about gifting roses to the women* in your life — even if they’re for Clara Zetkin — but rather about fighting for the end of exploitation of everyone involved in the supply chain for those roses to reach you, as well as those cleaning the petals off the dining table the next day.

Court case against Baki ends

Repression in Berlin – report #4


This is the fourth of our series of weekly court reports. You can read all the Repression in Berlin articles here.

This week’s column features the case of Baki Devrimkaya, an activist organized with Klasse gegen Klasse, who stood trial on February 10th for his pro-Palestine solidarity.

Baki served as a steward during a lecture hall occupation at the Freie Universität Berlin in December 2023. A group of right-wing agitators tried to derail the gathering by physically assaulting stewards, calling student protesters “Nazis,” and destroying photos of murdered Palestinian children. Baki was thereafter charged with assault, ”insult,” and “coercion” for allegedly preventing these disruptors from entering the occupied lecture hall.

After the protest, Baki became “the subject of a right-wing smear campaign, leading to death threats in social media and even intimidation on the street,” Nathaniel Flakin writes.

On February 10th, all three charges against Baki were dropped in exchange for a €450 donation to NGO medico international. Klasse gegen Klasse organized a rally in front of the courthouse, joined by over 70 comrades from different groups, which soon turned into a celebration after the verdict was announced.

Baki’s attorney Timo Winter remarked on the length of the proceedings, stating (translated from German): “We do not know for certain, but it can be assumed that the state of Berlin, the Ministry of Justice, has issued an instruction to pursue the repression of Palestine to the very end. This is something we are observing more and more, and we are concerned about the rights of freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, especially when it comes to Palestine.”

One of many, the case against Baki raises increasing concerns about the repression of pro-Palestinian activism and solidarity.

When language fails

The program “Goethe-Institut in Exile” was abruptly canceled. A reading scheduled for Berlin was therefore held elsewhere


02/03/2026

The voice of author and translator Alaa al-Qaisi falters as she recalls the Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna from Gaza. “She was still alive when I translated her text,” she says, sobbing. Hassouna was the central figure in the multi-award-winning documentary “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025. Shortly after learning that the film would be screened there, the photographer was killed in an Israeli airstrike; six of her family members died with her. All that remains of her are her photographs and her writings.

“We have lost many people who constituted our cultural memory,” adds Ahmed Saleh, a poet and writer from Gaza who has applied for political asylum in Brussels. “I have lost my memory.” He explains that Israel has bombed and destroyed the archives and universities in the Gaza Strip during the current war. The 28-year-old belongs to a generation that has experienced five wars since 2008, “suffocating sieges” and “ongoing genocide”. His nephew was born in a tent, like his grandmother. “He doesn’t know what a home is, what a television is, what a house with walls is.”

The reading was scheduled for Wednesday evening at the Acud cultural center on Veteranenstrasse in Berlin’s Mitte district. In recent years, the center has hosted “Goethe-Institut in Exile” festivals featuring artists from Ukraine, Belarus, Afghanistan, and Iran. However, less than 48 hours beforehand, the event was canceled at short notice.

And not only that: the Goethe-Institut’s board of directors decided to discontinue the entire “Goethe-Institut in Exile” program “with immediate effect”, its press office announced on Wednesday. The “acute strain” and “limited funding” made it impossible to continue the program “under the current circumstances”, the statement explained.

Abrupt end without real explanation

The program was scheduled to end in a few months anyway, but around 20 events were still planned until then. The Goethe-Institut declined to comment on whether and how the sudden cancellation was related to the planned reading. However, the abrupt termination of a long-running series of events is highly unusual and gives the impression that someone pulled the emergency brake.

The curator and his friends therefore moved the reading at short notice to a cultural venue in Schöneberg, where over a hundred people crowded in that evening. Among them were the former director of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, Hortensia Völckers, and Bernd Scherer, former director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures).

“We are authors, we are poets, we are artists,” said the writer Abdalrahman Alqalaq in English at the beginning of the event. He had curated the reading. But every text is inherently political—especially against the backdrop of genocide and oppression. The author, born in the Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, whose poetry collection “Transition Rite” was published in 2024 by Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen, had been compiling the program for the reading since December 2025 when the Goethe-Institut pulled the plug.

Because the funding was withdrawn, they couldn’t afford to pay a translator, explains literary scholar Maha El-Hissy, who is moderating the evening. Palestinian suffering has existed for decades, she says. But texts about it are perceived as disturbing in Germany. History, however, is inherently disturbing.

“We are all children of the Nakba,” says poet Asmaa Azaizeh, thus drawing a parallel to her two colleagues from Gaza. The 41-year-old is from Haifa, in Israel. The atmosphere of censorship and self-censorship is familiar to her. Until 1967, the Palestinian minority that remained in Israel lived under military censorship. Theaters were closed, and artists were imprisoned. The parents had taught the children to be silent, and in schools, they learned nothing about their own history, but a great deal about Auschwitz and the Cold War. She only learned later that before the Nakba, there had been over 30 Arab publishing houses and over 50 weekly newspapers in Haifa. The memory of urban Palestine had been suppressed.

Language has become functional

Like most people, she followed the events in Gaza on her smartphone. She’s still searching for a way to process them. “I don’t want to put the catastrophe into words,” she says, reading a poem she wrote for her son on the plane from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv. The poem is about her feelings and revolves around the cartoon character Peppa Pig. “I have nothing left. Everything was stolen from me, including my right to a normal life.”

Language has become functional, Alaa al-Qaisi says, referring to the people in Gaza. “Do you have water? Do you have gas?” These are the kinds of questions people in the Gaza Strip ask themselves. There’s no room for poetry. When she calls there, she can’t simply wish someone a happy birthday. The children there talk about tanks and fighter jets, not about happiness or joy. The slender author and translator, who wears a headscarf, will soon be moving to Dublin.

Maha El-Hissy says it is difficult for her to say that the “Goethe-Institut in Exile” program no longer exists. But the program is now history.

This article was translated by Ana Ferreira and originally appeared in German at taz.de.

Of Elites, Imperial Nostalgia, and Denialism

Europe Boards the Bandwagon of (Self)-Destruction


01/03/2026

It is difficult not to feel a sense of vertigo—tinged with a certain disgust—at the speed with which grim news multiplies week after week. Especially regarding international policies emanating from the West. Once again, a brief chronicle of imperial USA decline unfolds amid preparations for a potential war against Iran, with European allies. The empire will die while it destroys other people’s lives, and it is not short of loyal followers.

Recent events show how old colonialism reinvents itself. Remarks delivered by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference to the upper ranks of Europe’s Atlanticist elite illustrated this.. I Rubio blamed immigrants for Europe’s decline and called for joint reindustrialization between Europe and the United States. He also evoked, with unmistakable imperial nostalgia, the colonial era when the West expanded across the globe, bringing “prosperity” and “civilization” to the so-called barbarian world. After 1945, he argued, a weakened postwar Europe was struck by atheistic communists and decolonial movements. Now, Rubio concluded, this decline must be confronted “together.” In his speech, Rubio said: „This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon. It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on. It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again. For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe“

His message amounted to a call for the regroupment of former postcolonial powers and a declaration of confrontation against those unwilling to align with imperial policy/ This was a pointed signal to the Global South and to blocs such as the BRICS. The speech was saturated with imperial longing, and it was met with applause from an audience of compliant European elites.

Geopolitical commentator Ben Norton wrote on “X”:

“What the US empire is doing now with Gaza, Venezuela, and Cuba is what awaits most of humanity, and European elites applaud enthusiastically.”

With such leaders at the helm, and with an indifferent, intimidated, and complacent population, little can be expected from Europe. In Germany, shameless political support for the genocide in Gaza continues, even as politicians tour a territory reduced to ruins. Meanwhile, prominent artists. prefer silence. This was the case with the German director Wim Wenders, who, during a press conference at the Berlin International Film Festival, was confronted with a question about the genocide in Gaza. Wenders replied that the festival was „not political,” contradicting himself from years earlier. His response provoked the Indian writer Arundhati Roy to cancel her visit to the festival in protest at his remarks.

Meanwhile, Germany deepens its ties with Israel.Inside Germany the repression of pro-Palestinian protest persists, through repressive measures that have been declared unconstitutional in both Germany and England. At the same time, the political class  has sought to deny the genocide in Gaza, as noted by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention. This is particularly troubling in a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by law.

Added to this is the pressure exerted by governments allied with Israel(France, the United Kingdom, and Germany)which call for the resignation of the courageous UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. She is a leading voice documenting the genocide in Gaza, but has been slandered by the circulation of a manipulated video. These governments attacked Albanese with a troubling hypocrisy and a lack of intellectual honesty, as they did not attempt to verify the material’s authenticity. In this climate, truth itself has been discarded. What we are witnessing is, quite simply, a war.As Yanis Varoufakis recently wrote:

“Today, Francesca Albanese’s detractors, those who seek to shield Israel from her well-documented, factual, legitimate criticism by getting her fired or by forcing her resignation from her position of UN Special Rapporteur – these people do not understand one thing:

Francesca will NEVER stop! She will continue to expose Israel’s crimes whether she is the UN’s Special Rapporteur or not. My message to them is simple: Francesca Albanese may be even more successful in shining light on Israel’s genocide if you strip her of her UN role. Beware what you wish for!”

As the genocide in Gaza continues and Israel prepares the de facto annexation of the West Bank in violation of international law once again, yet another spectacle of horror arises from the Epstein files. It turned out that the much-maligned “conspiracy theorists” were right to  point out the profound moral decay of global capitalist elites. Beyond the moral outrage provoked by the actions of this bunch of unscrupulous torturers, murderers, and pedophiles, I suspect that the exposure of these cruelty-laden archives also contributes to the normalization of violence against the vulnerable. Is this not one of the central messages of Trump and his supremacist allies? Hatred and contempt for the weak—be they immigrants, Latinos, Black people, homosexuals, or anyone who does not fit into the racist imaginary of MAGA politics.

Thus, I invite readers to interpret this “scandal” differently: Epstein and his vast network of Zionist pedophiles are not merely another sign of elite corruption and impunity. Rather they expose the staggering violence that underlies this economic and political system, its structural foundation. Given the level of dehumanization and destruction of human lives in Gaza, this should not come as a surprise. Cruelty advances. The Epstein files simply reaffirm what we already know—that power and money go hand in hand. The relationship between the system and these figures is not incidental. These are neither the system’s “black sheep” nor exceptions to the rule; they are expressions of the system itself. Indeed, the system is a machine for producing such monsters. Epstein, Trump, politicians, aristocrats, scientists, and Mossad intelligence agents—all those who appear within that network—embodied the violence of this order; they are its defenders, its products, and its guardians. Should we really be surprised by imperial violence against Venezuela, attempts to starve Cuba, renewed aggression against Iran, or the near-total destruction of the Gaza Strip?

It seems that the so‑called “culture war,” as the far right likes to call it, has now reached the boundaries of geopolitics and international relations. What now prevails is raw, unadulterated imperial violence, with the clear complicity of its European lackeys. Munich provided us with another example of this will to death and nihilism at the heart of the European elites.

Meanwhile, those annoying elements who dare to denounce this violence—the genocide in Gaza, the criminal blockade of Cuba, the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the imminent war against Iran—are declared the new enemies. Enemies of the wonderful Western civilization, the so‑called “cradle” of democracy and the free market. Because of the wickedness of those Others—whether Arabs, Chinese, critics, communists, anti‑imperialists, decolonialists, etc.—the empire and its lackeys will be forced to resort to violence for their own preservation, both inwardly and outwardly.This is not only an expression of imperial nostalgia but also a desire to restore an old colonial order in which the West rules again. We on the other side cannot expect to be treated well by people with great power and few scruples. Rubio’s speech shows us with striking clarity that the coloniality of power—as a particular system of domination characterized by Aníbal Quijano—is more alive than ever. Europe is nostalgic for its dissipated imperial power, far from resisting this decadent narrative. Indeed Europe seems willing to climb aboard the wagon of (self‑)destruction that these riders of the apocalypse are prepared to inflict on the world.

Starmer’s by-election disaster shows opportunities for Right and Left

The Green victory in Gorton and Denton should be celebrated, but when will we see a real Left challenge?


28/02/2026

On 26th February, 2026, Sir Keir Starmer’s British Labour Party experienced an electoral debacle. In a by-election in Gorton and Denton, a constituency in Manchester where just 1½ years previously, Labour won 50.8%, they halved their vote, coming third in a constituency which they had held since 1931. Labour was beaten by both the Green Party and the far-right Reform. 

The Greens received 40.7% of the vote in the constituency—four times better than their previous by-election result. Party leader Zack Polanski told BBC Breakfast that Gorton and Denton was only his party’s 127th target seat. That is, if they could win here, there were 126 constituencies where they had a higher chance of winning.

Labour were not the only losers. Both the Conservative and Liberal Parties each got less than 2% of the vote and lost their deposits (in British electoral law, if you receive less than 5% of the votes, you have to pay all your own electoral costs). This was only the second time ever that the Conservatives have lost their deposit in a by-election.

This was also only the second by-election where neither establishment party—Labour and the Conservatives—appeared in the top two. The first occasion—when George Galloway won in Rochdale in 2024—only happened because Labour disowned and withdrew their support from their own candidate.

How did we get here?

The Gorton and Denton by-election took place because sitting MP Andrew Gwynne retired on “health grounds”. Gwynne had sent offensive messages in a WhatsApp group, in which he said he hoped that a 72-year old woman who did not support him would die. He was also accused of making racist comments about Black MP Diane Abbott and said that the name of American psychologist, Marshall Rosenberg, “sounds too militaristic and too Jewish.”

Labour had an obvious candidate in Andy Burnham, the current mayor of Manchester who is looking to return to parliament. Burnham is currently very popular, although his politics are at best Soft Left. Starmer and his allies bureaucratically prevented Burnham from standing because they feared that Burnham would try to replace Starmer as party leader. Labour Party rules say that only MPs are allowed to become leader.

Starmer himself was receiving historically low popularity ratings. By January 2026, his unpopularity rating was 75%. Starmer’s net favourability rating of -57 is the joint-lowest recorded for any prime minister other than Liz Truss. Truss was prime minister for just 49 days.

Starmer’s response to his unpopularity has been to tack to the right. In a speech in May 2025, he said that Britain risked “becoming an island of strangers.” These words echoed a notorious speech by racist politician Enoch Powell. Starmer and his advisors were either deliberately stoking racism or woefully ignorant.

As Labour’s campaign stumbled on, they went from crisis to crisis. Less than a week before the by-election, Peter Mandelson—Starmer’s political ally and the man he proposed as US ambassador—was arrested on suspicion of misconduct because of his connections with Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer had already been forced to get rid of both Mandelson and chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. 

Starmer’s loyal support for Israel was also damaging his credibility. On 13th February, the high court ruled that  the government’s decision to label Palestine Action as a terrorist group (and thus as great a danger as Islamic State) was disproportionate and unlawful. Rather than accepting the court’s ruling, Starmer’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood  immediately announced that she would be challenging the decision

The Threat of Reform

It is just 19 months since the Conservatives were routed at a general election in which the numbers voting Tory halved from 14 million to 7 million. Both mainstream parties are deeply unpopular. This would be the perfect time for an insurgent left wing campaign. Unfortunately, the main beneficiaries so far of the Centre not holding are Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform Party.

Reform is funded by shipping magnates, climate change deniers, and investors in fossil fuel. Its website claims: “Net Zero is pushing up bills, damaging British industries like steel, and making us less secure”. The alternative it offers is the oxymoronic “clean nuclear energy.” 

Despite recent revelations that Farage conducted “deeply offensive, racist and antisemitic behaviour” at school, including “giving Nazi salutes and goose-stepping”, Reform still tops the polls at 26%, with both Labour and the Conservatives languishing at 18%. Although Gorton and Denton was over 400 on their hit list (that is, there were more than 400 constituencies that they were more likely to win), it looked like Reform had a very good chance of winning.

After the Green’s election victory, Farage raised concerns about “family voting” in Muslim areas—a racist assumption which questions the importance of Muslim votes. We have not heard similar concerns about Christian families who send their children to private schools and all vote for the right.

Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in Gorton and Denton, is a nasty piece of work. He was endorsed by the Fascist “Tommy Robinson.” After racist riots ended with people trying to burn down a hotel containing asylum seekers, Goodwin called this an understandable reaction to “mass immigration”. 

Goodwin has also claimed that people born in the UK are not necessarily British, and suggested that women who don’t have children should pay more tax. His campaign manager Adam Mitula was suspended after saying “I wouldn’t touch a Jewish woman”, and denying the Holocaust. But what was he doing as campaign manager in the first place? 

The Green Surge

Since Zack Polanski became Green leader less than 6 months ago, party membership has nearly tripled to 175,000. There are now more members of the Green Party than of either the Conservative or Liberal parties.

Green candidate Hannah Spencer, a former plumber, wrote before the election: “I’m fighting for lower bills, for neighbourhoods scarred by austerity and underinvestment, and to stop the privatisation of the NHS.” In her victory speech, she added: “I’ve made clear my position and my commitment to working-class communities—the community that I am from.” 

The speech also took on her racist opponents, saying “I can’t and won’t accept this victory tonight, without calling out politicians and divisive figures who constantly scapegoat and blame our communities for all the problems in society. My Muslim friends and neighbours are just like me—human.” Spencer spoke at the launch meeting of Women Against the Far Right, and she also released campaign videos in Urdu. She has the potential to provide an important link between parliament and social movements.

Labour’s reactionary response to the Green surge was, sadly, to be expected. Before the election, an anonymous Labour MP said: “The worst outcome for us would be a win for the Greens, or any result which shows us finishing behind them. That could herald the kind of split in the left which we saw in the right at the last election and which gave us a landslide victory.”

Labour’s Negative Campaigning

In the absence of policies which benefitted the local community, Labour’s election campaign focussed on attacking Reform, and—increasingly—the Greens. In the last few days of the campaign, Labour hysterically attacked the Greens’ drugs policy, falsely, and regularly, portraying decriminalisation as being the same as legalisation (it is not). 

Policing minister Sarah Jones claimed: “Playgrounds would become ‘crack dens’ if Greens were in power”. Starmer himself said: “the Green Party’s policy isn’t just irresponsible, it’s reprehensible, legalising cocaine, heroin, ketamine and the date rape drug, GHB, a drug which we know is used to spike drinks for women.”

These were not the only Labour lies. On the evening before the election, Labour put out a leaflet saying “Tactical Choice says Vote Labour. Based on a new prediction made in the last 24 hours we are recommending voting Labour.” No organisation called Tactical Choice exists.

Labour’s Facebook page continued this defamation. As it became clear that the Greens were leading in the polls, Labour persistently argued that only they could stop Reform. They posted a series of bar charts of expected results in which the Green prognosis (higher than both Labour and Reform) was absent. 

Actions have consequences. There will be future elections in which Labour may well be the party most likely to beat Reform. But voters will remember the lies of Gorton and Denton where Labour’s fear of anything remotely left of centre ended with them trying to sabotage the only campaign likely to beat the Right.

Where was the Left?

While all this was going on, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party was electing a new executive. This led to rancourous infighting between different slates supporting Corbyn and Sultana. I experienced the worst of this on 61.8% – Supporting Corbyn’s Mandate, another Facebook page which was set up when Corbyn was Labour leader, and often echoed the factional sectarianism found on the Labour page.

On the page, to which only admins could post, there was a worrying number of posts attacking Zarah Sultana and her Grassroots Left slate (sample quotes: “Zarah Sultana does not support or respect Jeremy Corbyn!”, “Revolutionary socialists aka Grassroots left, never miss an opportunity to data harvest”, “Zarah’s disgraceful record!”). In contrast, posts attacking Labour and Reform were largely absent.

Responding to such red-baiting and ad hominem attacks is like wrestling a pig; you both get dirty and only the pig likes it. But one thing needs saying here. One repeated attack against Sultana was that she prematurely announced the founding of a new left party. If Corbyn and allies had not dithered for so many years, it could have been a Your Party candidate who was cleaning up in Gorton and Denton.

Voting for the new executive was supposed to heal these divisions, and yet a couple of days after both elections, a “veteran socialist” and supporter of Corbyn told the Guardian: “Zarah alienated many people in Muslim communities by saying things like there was no place for social conservatives in the party, and we need to rebuild that trust.”

The response from a friend in the UK to this article was “YP is fucked”. The worst way to respond to a radical and insurgent Green electoral victory is by courting social conservatism, or by repeating the slightly racist suggestion that “Muslim communities” are socially conservative. This focus on electoral respectability risks condemning Your Party to electoral and political oblivion.

What next?

Keir Starmer is likely to hang on as Labour leader, if only because there are council elections in May, and the party needs a scapegoat to take the blame for Labour’s almost certain disastrous performance. After that, the party lacks any credible alternative to Starmer. Time will tell whether Labour has damaged itself irreparably, but we should shed no tears at the death of a neoliberal imperialist project.

The immediate beneficiaries of Gorton and Denton are the Greens, long seen as a fringe party. The current Green programme is much more radical than anything offered by Labour. Hannah Spencer’s result is a victory for radical socialist ideas above hate and division. We should all celebrate. And yet, we should remember the experience of the Greens in government. 

In Brighton, the Green-led council proposed £4,000 pay cuts, leading to a week-long bin strike. In Germany, where the Greens have come closer to power, they have been much worse, participating in neoliberal governments and providing warmongering foreign ministers like Joschka Fischer and Annalena Baerbock.

Meanwhile, Reform continues to build. It is a sign of how broken British politics are that a nasty, racist party could gain over 10,000 votes in a constituency where 44% of the population identify as coming from a ethnic minority background. That does not mean that there are over 10,000 racists in that part of Manchester, but a lot of people are demanding serious change. 

Two days before the election, a man was arrested for carrying an axe into a Manchester mosque. The threat posed by Reform is not just seen in election results, but in giving confidence to violent racists. If the Left is unable to offer credible answers, the Right will exploit the situation.

I hope that Your Party gets its act together and offers a serious challenge to the neoliberal consensus and the far-right danger. Where this means working with the Greens, so be it, but it requires a clear socialist identity, which is not worried about shocking social conservatives. Above all, the Left must combine parliamentary campaigns with a fight on the streets, starting with the demonstration against the far right in London on 28th March.