Welcome to Issue 8 of Critical Mass.

When we began one of our stated aims was to change the conversation around socialism. Today, for the first time we publish a conversation that was stimulated by one of our news stories. It is a discussion about mandatory vaccines and Covid passports in which ordinary people show they can have an intelligent conversation about a complex issue without it becoming confrontational and binary in the way that mainstream media love to shape such discussions.

If other people would like to organize their own conversations to share on Critical Mass we are open to suggestions. But if you are going to share a conversation, please ensure that you have permission from all the participants.

A recurring theme for Critical Mass is the Climate Crisis and today the Spotlight falls on environmental campaigner Howard Thorp. I hope we changed the light bulb in the spotlight for LEDs beforehand. As well as writing regularly for Critical Mass, Howard has his own blog Capitalism Creates Poverty (capitalism-creates-poverty.blogspot.com)

This week we publish in the shadow of the deaths of 27 refugees in the English Channel. Some of our authors had already written articles about refugees, migration and about the rise in racism fuelled by government pronouncements before the tragedy. We publish them today.

• Another young Palestinian killed and fears of more violence during upcoming Israeli march
• Extinction Rebellion Protests at Shell AGM
• Rage Against the Tories! Build the TUC Demo
• Diplomacy or bloodshed? What exactly does Zelensky want?
• Australian Labor Party Wins Election
• Sunday Socialist May 22
• Free Julian Assange – He risks losing everything
• When is a war crime not a war crime? When it’s committed by the West
• From the river to the sea…
• Investigative journalism? A look back to when words truly were weapons
• The UK Authoritarian Oligarchy and How to Oppose It
• Truth Is A Weapon
• What sort of country are we? The detention of refugees in the UK shames us all
• With The Miners
• Sense Out Of Nonsense: Northern Ireland, Brexit, and Liz Truss
• Barates and Regina and Many More
• Civil Service under attack again
• Alfred Linnell: the death of an ordinary man
• 91,000 Civil Servants Face the Sack
• How forgotten peoples are kept in the margins
• Welcome to Critical Mass Issue 15
• The Critical Mass Socialist Hour Episode 20

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