CommonSpace takes a look at what’s happening on May Day across the world

MAY DAY, also known as Labour Day and International Workers’ Day, takes place on 1 May every year all around the world – although the US celebrates the holiday on the first Monday of September instead.

It all began in Chicago, USA, on 4 May 1886, a demonstration known as the Haymarket Affair.

Alasdair Clark (@alasdair_clark), freelance journalist, says that the First Minister’s speech on Scotland’s constitutional future could provide Scottish Labour an opportunity to show its learned from past mistakes

WEDNESDAY'S speech from Nicola Sturgeon was perfectly designed by the First Minister; it will broadly appeal to her own base and challenge her opposition home and away.

Sturgeon was never going to fully satisfy those whose hashtag is #DissolveTheUnion. She calculated her political capital and spent wisely.

Scottish Labour’s reluctant embrace of the devolution of employment law marks a reversal from the Smith Commission days – and raises questions about why other powers shouldn’t also be devolved

SCOTTISH LABOUR leader Richard Leonard spoke to the annual congress of the Scottish Trades Union Congress on Monday [15 April] in Dundee, and brought the party into line with long-standing STUC policy on employment law

Ross Ahlfeld, Christian socialist, argues that Blue Labour – a socially conservative social democratic ideology – wrongly views communities and places as stable entities, when in fact they have been and are always changing

CommonSpace editor Ben Wray says likely European Parliamentary elections in six weeks time could be the beginning of a breach with two-party politics in England, with insurgency’s on the Remain centre and Brexit right.

WEDNESDAY’S EU Council is almost certain to grant the UK Government its extension – not the one the Prime Minister asked for, but one she’ll have to make do with.

The May and Corbyn negotiations make a lot of political sense for both leaders – but it doesn’t mean they won’t fail

MAY’S chucked her lot in with a marxist, of all things. Or has she actually? In the bamboozling smoke and mirrors of Brexit, you have to be careful before making hard and fast statements about what’s going on. 

Using the problem solving principle of Occam’s razor - that simple solutions are more likely to be correct than complex ones - we can with some confidence say the following about May’s pivot towards the opposition:

If you portray the Labour leader as an enemy of the state, how do you expect him to be perceived by those charged with defending it?

BY NOW, you will likely be aware of the footage currently in viral circulation, which appears to show members of our brave armed forces heroically assassinating a photograph.

David Jamieson explains why CommonSpace has submitted a dossier on islamophobia in the party, and why the party’s response to the clearly evidenced cases of islamophobia among senior figures from the New Labour years matters

The Labour leadership’s tortured efforts to hold Labour-Remain and Labour-Leave voters together is a product of Labour’s left British nationalism which sees questions of the nature of state power as a distraction from real class politics

THE maelstrom over Labour’s Brexit position has been so long-running and, frankly, increasingly boring that you could be forgiven for some scepticism about whether the latest twist genuinely is a turning point.