Britain: an election disaster and the death agony of Boris Johnson Last week, the Tories suffered a humiliating electoral defeat in their formerly safe seat of North Shropshire, a rural constituency dominated by the Conservative Party for nearly 200 years. Boris Johnson is running out of road as he lurches from one scandal to another. This opens up further instability and crisis for British capitalism.
How the British state came to see Militant as a ‘subversive threat’ In the post-war period, MI5 (the British state’s internal security agency) paid little attention to the activities of Trotskyists in Britain, regarding the threat that they posed to be minimal. But the rise of the Militant in the 1970s and 1980s – a tightly organised, professional and theoretically trained organisation founded by Ted Grant – completely transformed the Secret Services’ perception of Trotskyism.
Assange can be extradited to USA: rules complicit UK court Journalist and founder of the whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks Julian Assange can now be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage, ruled Her Majesty's High Court on 10 December. This ruling was in favour of an appeal by the US government to overturn the previous decision by the Westminster Magistrates' Court from January, which denied the extradition on the grounds that the harsh and restrictive prison conditions that Assange may face could worsen his mental wellbeing, creating a real risk of suicide.