DK Renton

ICI Amu Gib Finsbury Park Fundraiser | Islington Community Independents (Powered by Donorbox) Welfare Not Warfare // Prisons Don’t Work // Migration is Life // Free PalestineAmu Gib is standing for election with Islington Community Independents while on remand in HMP Bronzefield for allegedly ...

The fundraiser for Amu Gib - the Prisoners for Palestine hunger striker standing for election in May

donorbox.org/ici-amu-gib-...

Those Who Came Before From autumn 1970 till summer 1971, the beatnik poet, translator of Victor Serge, and future Marxist critic of the anti-psychiatry movement Peter Sedgwick was living in Queens, a borough of New York.

He found them “acutely sophisticated and seasoned,” better read in Marxist theory than their counterparts back home. Several dropped the word “heavy” into conversation, using it as an exclamation, an adjective, or a noun...

davidrenton590934.substack.com/p/those-who-...

'Losing Our Country': Reform crash in Manchester - Salvage Arrogance cost Reform the Gorton and Denton by-election; the same vice hurt Labour too. The contest took place after Labour MP Andrew Gwynne resigned. He had been suspended from the party for retweeti...

Goodwin struck a different note, after losing by five thousand votes, saying ’I don’t think the progressives beat us, I think the progressives were told how to vote.’ He said, ‘We are losing our country.’ Let’s hope they are.

salvage.zone/losing-our-c...

The Palestine Hunger Striker Standing for Election Palestine activist Amu Gib is running for council from prison. Their election would be a victory for the movement and a defeat for the government that jailed them.

Palestine activist Amu Gib is running for council from prison. Their election would be a victory for the movement and a defeat for the government that jailed them.

The Palestine Hunger Striker Standing for Election Palestine activist Amu Gib is running for council from prison. Their election would be a victory for the movement and a defeat for the government that jailed them.

So proud of all my friends and comrades in ICI for having adopted the best class struggle candidate anywhere in this May's local elections

tribunemag.co.uk/2026/02/the-...

Brown Glasses Here’s a phrase I learned this week: faecal tenesmus. It describes when happends when you feelings are based on error. In this case, the part of me doing the feeling is the nerves around my bowel. My ...

"...The bowel isn’t always wrong - nine times on Saturday evening, I shat myself awake, the real stinking brown stuff, sore and runny. Dignity, eh?..."

substack.com/home/post/p-...

Many thanks to the good folks at Waterstones who are offering my Forgiveness book at 25% off (till Friday) - use code FEB26 when ordering.

www.waterstones.com/book/revolut...

High Court declares Palestine Action ban unlawful The High Court has declared that the Palestine Action ban is unlawful, but the group remains proscribed for now, pending further hearings and a likely appeal by the government. As they waited for the High Court decision, pro-Gaza activists feared the worst. Previous hearing since the group was proscribed in July had seen small victories. Mr Justice Chamberlain had accepted that campaigners were entitled to challenge the Home Secretary’s decision through judicial review. The Court of Appeal upheld that decision in October. It also permitted the founder of Palestine Action, Huda Ammori, to amend and strengthen her appeal by adding new grounds. When a campaign is “proscribed,” or added to the list of terrorist groups, the law draws a sharp distinction. It allows anyone to campaign against the banning of the outlawed group. At the same time, it forbids any expression of support for them. Where support takes the form of wearing or displaying an item, for example a placard, the maximum jail term is 6 months. For any other expression of support the maximum term is 14 years’ imprisonment. Campaigners have tried to show the arbitrary nature of those rules by drawing up placards with messages which called for...

High Court declares Palestine Action ban unlawful
->New Statesman | More on "Palestine Action ban ruled unlawful" at BigEarthData.ai | #IsraelWar #Palestine

What happened to the ban, pending appeal - has it been lifted?

Your Party CEC elections rs21 - revolutionary socialism in the 21st century

Over the next two weeks voting will take place for the Your Party Central Executive Committee. The rs21 steering group outlines what’s at stake.

revsoc21.uk/2026/02/10/y...

Or, how the appointment is described in the Baldwin bio. "As ever, however, he [i.e Starmer] had prepared his ground. He received encouragement from Ken Macdonald, whose five-year term as DPP was coming to an end and was seen as having blazed a trail for progressive lawyers in the post."

Keir Starmer proves the case for not having a prosecutor as DPP | Ken Macdonald Ken Macdonald: The retiring director of public prosecutions did a first-class job: otherness brings the freedom to say no

This is him playing the role of Keir's mentor in the Guardian (www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...).

Sorry, being slow here, but surely you're not talking about Ken Macdonald - the man who lobbied hard for Keir to take over from him in the DPP job - are you?

What’s going on when Rob Schenck is interviewed about Minneapolis? Earlier today, the good folks at Reveal (a public radio station linked to Mother Jones) ran an interview with Evangelical pastor Rob Schenk.

His story is like those accounts you read of the life-long Republican who’s now sitting on her household porch, in -20 degrees, a whistle round her neck, ready to make the loudest racket she can to stop the ICE army from kidnapping a kid...

davidrenton590934.substack.com/p/whats-goin...

DK Renton (@davidkr.bsky.social) author of our forthcoming book on Comrade Delta, spoke to @acidhorizon.bsky.social about the 2013 crisis.

Goodby, Gerry Nick Griffin called him a “vicious old Communist and Zionist thug”, which Gerry Gable would have taken as a compliment.

Anti-fascists in the 1990s read the magazine, were shaped by it, all of us were, whatever tradition we belonged to. davidrenton590934.substack.com/p/goodby-gerry

Nothing systematic, but there’s a lot on law and bodies in Dean Spade’s work, eg here
www.deanspade.net/wp-content/u...

Not going to Camden for the SWP conference this year? Don't worry, you can get all the analysis you need, the discussion of what went wrong, and of how we build left-wing organisations without repeating the mistakes here...

With thanks to Adam for hosting and to my fellow guest Elane

Screenshot of text: The Supreme Court said that trans people without GRCs are still protected from harassment. In reality, they lost that years ago. Go into a workplace, use any insult, speak any slur term you like - and the state of UK discrimination law is that the harasser is protected. It's not too difficult to see where this is going. In America, Presidential orders already declare that anyone seeking to travel to that country using a passport with a sex other than the one on their birth certificate, should be treated as carrying out immigration fraudster. States are experimenting with ideas of legislation to carry forwards the criminalisation of trans people: jail for hairdressers who permit their client to have haircuts in the wrong sex.

I, maybe naively, think this won’t be permanent. But right now, I can’t imagine just how difficult it is to be trans (or enby) right now. @davidkr.bsky.social writes on one of the most shameful legal cases in UK history.

livesrunning.wordpress.com/2025/04/16/t...

Yes, agree about timing

When Conflict -is- Abuse [TW: discussion of intimate violence].

Shunning, Schulman writes, is arbitrary. Shunning prevents the departee from learning necessary valuable lessons. In this account, all departures are bad, even the victim of sustained physical violence, shunning the domestic home under threat of death.

davidrenton590934.substack.com/p/when-confl...

"The apology says, “We were wrong in how we responded to the two cases”, how were you wrong? “The process we had in place at that time was entirely inadequate”, how was it inadequate? The SWP is willing to admit to the vaguest and most weightless of things – error – but can’t say what people did, or who was affected by their actions, or why they were so destructive." D K Renton Is it time to forgive the SWP? DAVIDRENTON590934.SUBSTACK.COM

Ahead of @davidkr.bsky.social's book Comrade Delta, on the 2013 scandal in the Socialist Workers Party, DK Renton assesses the recent changes at the top of the party, asking 'Is it time to forgive the SWP?'

davidrenton590934.substack.com/p/is-it-time...

Is it time to forgive the SWP? The SWP has gone public with its plans to remove four people from its central committee: Alex Callinicos, Charlie Kimber, Weyman Bennett and Mark Thomas.

Of the critics who were mocked, humiliated, threatened with violence, spat on, lied about, or had to watched in horror as the SWP tried to drive them out of the labour movement – to which is the party now willing to admit it did wrong? davidrenton590934.substack.com/p/is-it-time...

Did Your Party's conference do enough to turn the tide of its disastrous beginnings? Corbyn and Sultana's new party is likely to benefit from factors for which it can claim no credit.

Corbyn and Sultana's new party is likely to benefit from factors for which it can claim no credit.

New from David Renton on The Lead as he considers what next for Your Party

Third Reich ’n’ Roll A new book reflects on the music industry’s disturbing obsession with Nazi aesthetics and ideology — ranging over unexpected examples of fascist fetishism, and celebrating those who challenged it.

Between 1965 and 1980, dozens of the best-known musicians in Britain were collectors of Nazi regalia…

tribunemag.co.uk/2025/12/thir...

In defence of jury trials rs21 - revolutionary socialism in the 21st century

DK Renton argues that David Lammy’s proposal to severely cut the number of jury trials is another authoritarian step by Labour.

revsoc21.uk/2025/11/30/i...

Here is a list of reasons why some of my hearings and trials this year have been delayed and kicked off into the long grass, stuck in our record court backlog. Serious allegations which will now be tried *years* after the event. 🧵👇

Yes, this weekend’s Conference is Your Party’s last chance – but don’t assume we’ll blow it This Saturday and Sunday, delegates will be gathering at Liverpool ACC’s conference centre to discuss the founding of a new party.

In a number of towns and cities, local activists have ignored the leadership contest and pressed on with local organising. Where people have done that – as we have in Islington – we’ve enjoyed the experience

davidrenton590934.substack.com/p/yes-this-w...

Let’s put the politics back in: On a new history of the Anti-Nazi League

"...Telling the story of the Anti-Nazi League without giving equal weight to Rock Against Racism is like telling a version of Romeo and Juliet in which Romeo delivers his lines, while cutting Juliet’s words back to him..."

On a new history of the 70s

davidrenton590934.substack.com/p/lets-put-t...

it would probably be sorta hard for just anyone to do it *this well* because it requires you to actually be normal about trans people, but still it feels important to state for the record that WE ARE NOT HARD TO STAND UP FOR AND ANY OF THEM COULD DO IT.