What’s in our February /March issue

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Not leading but drowning

Editorial:
Not flocks or herds

Cover story:
The future left
Stuart White outlines the key values of republican democracy and explores whether they can be fused with red and green politics

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Green pepper

Cop out?
Protesters from around the world came together outside the Copenhagen climate conference. Ben Lear reports

From Hopenhagen to Flopenhagen
What actually came out of Copenhagen? Oscar Reyes suggests much of the process was flawed from the beginning

Media

New futures
We must protect trusted news sources and liberate them from the free market, says Natalie Fenton

What would Rupert Murdoch say?
Saving local newspapers is not a matter of money but of political will, argues Jeremy Dear

Banks

Rocking the system
Hilary Wainwright looks at demands for a community-run Northern Rock

Royal bank of sustainability?
Since we own RBS, shouldn’t we have some say in how it is run? Kevin Smith puts the case

Tales of the riverbank
Molly Scott Cato proposes an alternative vision of banking

Banks for the people
Rethinking the financial system from a socialist perspective could have popular resonance, argues Costas Lapavitsas

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Fighting cuts

Bin there, won that
A strike by refuse workers in Leeds triggered a wave of public support. Peter lazenby reports

Ireland rising
The Irish trade union movement must defeat the government’s plans for cuts, writes Socialist Party MEP Joe Higgins

Government eats up the Greens
Former Irish Green Party member Bronwen Maher rues her ex-colleagues’ support for the coalition government in Ireland

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Hope for the innocent
Is the Criminal Cases Review Commission doing its job? Jon Robins investigates

Rats flee a sinking rat?
Alex Nunns on Chilcot’s Iraq war inquiry

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International

Beyond Berlusconi
Vittorio Longhi on the coalition opposing the removal of migrant workers in Italy and Giulio D’orema on investigative journalist Marco Travaglio

Brussels’ New Pontiff
The EU’s college of cardinals has picked its first pope, writes Leigh Phillips. Why aren’t we angry?

The law on ‘lawfare’
Israel calls for international law in aid of Palestine’s ‘legal terrorism’. Daniel Machover explains the need to resist

Heirs of Pinochet
The left must halt future advances by the Chilean right, says Roberto Navarrete

Western Sahara: Hunger striker
Stefan Simanowitz reports from Lanzarote on the remarkable victory of a hunger striker

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Culture

Anything but background music
Mike Marqusee celebrates flamenco: music that is popular but ‘utterly alien to pop’

In Picture: Dressing down
An illustrated look at the new book Dress Behind Bars: Prison Clothing as Criminality

An Anthropology of civil war
Ewa Jasiewicz looks at Austrian director Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon, an unflinching gaze into the roots of violence

An alien gaze
Herta Müller’s work casts experiences of oppressive authoritarian regimes in strikingly poetic language, writes Lyn Marven

Plus, four pages of book reviews

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Regulars

Editorial
Michael Calderbank

Democracy Now
Open to abuse

Booktopia 

Salma Yaqoob

Natural Born Rebel

Indigenous activist Aida Quilcué

Plattitudes 

The world according to Steve Platt

Asylum Watch
Informers in the classroom

Rearview

‘Bin there won that’ and ‘Rocking the system’ (page 20) are part of our series on emerging political movements, made possible with the help of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust

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