Creating Socialism @creatingsocialism.bsky.social

Critical Mass is now Creating Socialism. Follow us @CreateSocialism and view our articles penumbrage.com/category/creat… or email admin@creatingsocialism.com

What will happen in the coming weeks? Latest developments in the Labour Party have been extraordinary. In all the manoeuvering that is taking place who is the best bet to save us from a Reform government? @convivir @marlytyz118355 @CreateSocialism penumbrage.com/2026/05/17/new…

4.5 million children in this country are living in poverty.

I have written to Mark Rowley, the Met Police Commissioner, urging him to retract his baseless claims about our demonstrations for Palestine. Our marches are made of people of all faiths and none — and we will never stop campaigning until Palestine is free.

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?" Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything? Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it! And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else. Francesca Albanese is that someone. She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen." Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name. And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity. Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people. There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased. There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled." There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.” Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks. She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape". Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence. What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik. These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named. Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable. We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know." Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise. So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that. A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything. Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky. Let us stand with her. Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now. [Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

A very happy 100th birthday to David Attenborough. The whole world owes an enormous debt to David Attenborough for passionately defending the natural world and how we relate to it. Let us heed his lesson of living with nature, not on top of nature.

We will carry on marching for humanity. We will carry on marching for Palestine.

Trump blackmails Zambia using vital medicine to purloin Zambia’s minerals. Suffering citizens in Zambia, Cuba, Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon or Iran will not benefit from our royals’ visit which endorses the US imperialist mentality. penumbrage.com/2026/05/04/tru… @convivir @marlytyz118355

This is petition is now at almost 82,000 signatures. Let’s get it the 100,000 needed today petition.parliament.uk/petitions/7626…

We must not lose sight of the climate crisis. The Earth is in peril and we must guard it for those who come after us and all life on earth. Read how to watch the People’s Emergency Briefing. @convivir @marlytyz118355 @CreateSocialism @ChrisGPackham penumbrage.com/2026/04/27/cli…

Factions and manoeuvres rarely if ever published in our media. Starmer has been at the whim of a very small and shadowy elite, financed by wealthy donors, who all have their own political axes to grind. @marlytyz118355 @convivir @CreateSocialism penumbrage.com/2026/04/24/240…

There is much horror and devastation and war all over the world. The genocide in Sudan is unspeakable and is rarely reported in any depth by the media in the west. The UK is complicit. UK weapons are being used to fuel this war. @convivir @marlytyz118355 penumbrage.com/2026/04/20/sud…

Israel set to execute Palestinian prisoners action.eko.org/a/suspend-the-…?

While crowds cheer, horses fall. Since 2000, over 60 horses have died at the Grand National. This is not a national tradition - it's a national disgrace. #youbettheydie #GrandNational

2nd horse to die even before Grand National even starts #GrandNational

This horse broke his back on the last jump, jockey and animal abuser Paul Townend then forced and whipped the horse over the finish with a BROKEN BACK to finish 1st. The horse was killed x.com/Animalww26/sta…

Will Miliband make a decision for the planet? We are all risk from the use of fossil fuels. @marlytyz118355’s analysis for @CreateSocialism provides us with important information which we should all be aware of and act upon. @convivir penumbrage.com/2026/04/09/nor…

@marlytyz118355 @convivir @UKTogetherAll @amnesty @DefendOurJuries @EthicalRenewal @Battersby1888 @bane_baldy @David4rds

🚨KEIR STARMER IS SPEARHEADING ONE OF THE MOST SHOCKING ATTACKS ON CIVIL LIBERTIES IN MODERN TIMES The government has absolutely no mandate to do this. Labour never mentioned in its manifesto that it planned to undermine and restrict a fundamental cornerstone of our democracy - the right to trial by jury - a move which will place us on a path toward authoritarian justice. But it’s not too late for the government to listen to the thousands of voices of victims, judges, barristers, other legal professionals and academics who oppose this blatant act of constitutional vandalism. CONTACT YOUR MP NOW and ask them to step up and protect this cherished and precious cornerstone of our democracy

Palestine's national team played its first European match in a generation against the Basque Country, in a sold-out San Mamés stadium. While the Basque players walked onto the pitch with children by their side... The Palestinian players carried white roses instead. Roses for the children they can no longer hold. Roses for the thousands of innocent lives stolen in Israel's genocide. They didn't come for victory on the scoreboard. They came to remind the world: Palestine still breathes. Palestine still fights. Palestine is not alone. In the heart of the Basque people who know what it means to resist nearly 50,000 voices roared in solidarity. Football is never just a game when your people are being erased. This is more than a match. This is memory. This is defiance. This is humanity refusing to look away. Free Palestine. From the river to the sea.