Socialism Today

Goodbye to Russia – A personal reckoning from the ruins of war

By Sarah Rainsford

Published by Bloomsbury, 2024, £22

Reviewed by Clare Doyle

In Goodbye to Russia, Sarah Rainsford covers her two decades based in Moscow as a reporter for the BBC as well as an earlier period in St Petersburg as a student and an English teacher. In August 2021, like many journalists from Europe and the US, she was unceremoniously thrown out of Russia. Since then, she has been working for the BBC in other countries and is now based in Warsaw. In this book, she intersperses reports and reflections on her time in Russia with harrowing eye-witness accounts of life and death in war-torn Ukraine.

Starmer promised to introduce his ‘New Deal’ for workers within one hundred days of the election of a Labour government. Coming as it did two-thirds of the way through its first hundred days, the TUC Congress in Brighton should have drawn up a balance sheet of the initial stage of the new Labour government. This could have been the basis for a plan of union action to prepare workers for a response to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ first budget at the end of October and the struggles to come. This didn’t happen. But the congress did reveal that there are two main trends within the union movement in how it responds to Starmer’s government.

It has been a tale of woes and anguish in Nigeria as the government, led by Bola Tinubu, has continued to unleash multiple attacks on the mass of working people, youth and the poor. Not only have living standards been driven down by continuous implementation of neo-liberal, anti-poor policies, but also brutal attacks and crack-downs on anyone or anything that appears to be in opposition to the government’s anti-poor policies.

The war in Ukraine catapulted to the top of the news on 6 August when Ukrainian forces launched an unexpected assault over the border into the Kursk region of Russia.

They rapidly took over 400 square miles of territory, capturing dozens of villages and towns. Unprepared Russian forces were overcome and hundreds taken prisoner. Fears were sparked in the local population with hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing. This marked the first invasion of Russia since world war two and is a major humiliation for Putin. But can it change the course of the war?

The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet

By Brett Christophers

Published by Verso, 2024, £22

Reviewed by Paul Kershaw

The hope of keeping global heating in check rests in large measure on the future of electricity generation. Last year was the hottest in recorded history and probably in the last 100,000 years. As The Price is Wrong argues, decarbonising electricity production is one of humanities most pressing tasks.

HANNAH SELL assesses prospects for the global economy after the recent US interest rate cut.

On 18 September, the US central bank, ‘the Fed’, cut interest rates by 0.5%, the first cut in four and a half years. The US stock markets, already frothy, responded by surging to record new highs, taking it as an indication that the US economy is heading towards ‘a soft landing’.

Central bankers are also hoping that they might have pulled off a miracle. As Christian Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, put it, recent years have been a “severe stress test” for capitalism, with “the worst pandemic since the 1920s, the worst conflict in Europe since the 1940s and the worst energy shock since the 1970s”. Now the bankers hopes are rising that they might have successfully weathered those storms.

One year on from the 7 October attacks and the start of the horrific Israeli war on Gaza, JUDY BEISHON discusses the prospects for peace and national liberation in Israel/Palestine and the wider region.

Brutal wars have repeatedly been carried out by Israeli military forces on Gaza since a ruthless blockade was imposed on that strip of land in 2007. Each one brought terrible death and destruction but the present war, now approaching a year in duration, has taken the bloodshed and suffering to a horrific new level.

Through twelve months of heavy bombardment with hi-tech weapons, the Gaza strip has been made virtually uninhabitable, with its 2.3 million people trapped there in the most dire conditions imaginable. The number confirmed dead has gone over 41,000, with a further 10,000 reported missing, probably buried in the rubble of destroyed buildings. More than 95,000 have been injured, over a quarter of them to a physically life-changing degree. The reactions of shock and anger worldwide have been heightened by the fact that nearly half the Gaza strip’s population are children, whose trauma and suffering is off the scale.

Ten years after the 2014 Scottish independence referendum PHILIP STOTT, Socialist Party Scotland, draws a balance sheet of the independence campaign and discusses its future prospects.

On the face of it, the contrast between the insurgent mood that marked the run-up to the 18 September 2014 referendum and the prospects for Scottish independence today could not be more different. Indyref One was an elemental working-class uprising, primarily on the electoral plane, that shook the capitalist establishment in Britain and internationally.

It was the largest ever turnout in any election or plebiscite since the introduction of universal suffrage in Britain – 85% voted in the referendum. Tens of thousands took part in public meetings, campaigning and demonstrations amidst a ferocious propaganda counter-offensive by big business and the main pro-union capitalist parties. Over 1.6 million defied the dire warnings of the ruling elite by voting Yes to Scottish independence.

Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story

By Caroline Lucas

Published by Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024, £22

Reviewed by Martin Powell-Davies

After a summer when the far-right have managed to mobilise alienated youth and workers across many towns and cities in England, a book that sets out with the intention to “reclaim ‘Englishness’ from the Right” could be worth a read.

That’s what Caroline Lucas, who recently stood down as the Green Party’s first MP, has tried to do in her book, Another England – How to Reclaim Our National Story. Sadly, however, her rambling discussion, largely based on English literature, doesn’t offer much to the urgent debate about how best to undercut the far-right by offering a working-class, socialist, alternative.