The hardback edition of our new edited book, ‘In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British Far Left from 1956’, is published through @ManchesterUP today!
You can get 30% discount by using the code ‘EVENT30’ right now, or tell your library!
Evan Smith
@evansmithhist
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Academic/writer - Australia/UK - history/politics/criminology - he/him
Our new volume 'In Solidarity, Under Suspicion: The British Far Left from 1956', co-edited with Daniel Frost, is now available for pre-order from Manchester University Press.
Hardback is out Nov 2025, with a paperback edition to follow in 2026-27.
In my research on this topic, I also recently came across this article in the Washington Post from 1979 by the future US ambassador to Kenya complaining of the US hostility towards Rhodesia compared with its support for Israel, when both states shared similar traits.
I research the transnational solidarity & networks of whiteness, settler colonialism & anti-communism in the Cold War. I thought it was interesting that this 1976 issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine featured an interview with a Rhodesian general and story on an American mercenary in Israel.
Full issue can be found here: https://archive.org/details/soldieroffortunemagazine
If you're interested in the history of international solidarity with Palestine, many sources can be found in my list of radical online (and open access) archives. Over 500 collections from around the world are listed.
For example, the poster below can be found in the Digital Innovation South Africa archive, which has a wealth of material related to radical movements in South Africa.
https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/radical-online-collections-and-archives/
I wrote this for Jacobin about the long history of anti-communism and opposition to advancements in Indigenous rights in Australia, and how this has been revived by sections of the No campaign in the Voice referendum
For the Australian Far Right, Aboriginal Rights Have Always Been Synonymous With Communism
As the referendum over a First Nations Voice approaches, the No campaign is turning to deranged conspiracies that link Aboriginal rights with communism. But it’s not just paranoia — they’re drawing on a long history of racism and red-baiting.
The movie ‘Control’ was released this week in 2007.
I wrote this article in 2013 about how ‘Control’ and ‘24 Hour Party People’ both depicted Joy Division and the Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and strove for authenticity in different ways.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13619462.2013.840537
This is the same British exceptionalism that’s been around since 1930s. But Tories have been able to absorb the far right into the fold on occasions (eg 1979, 2019). Today, why would the British far right need a separate movement when there’s the Conservatives using their rhetoric?
Under Murdoch, The Sun, The News of the World and The Times became vehicles for blatant racism, sexism, homophobia, warmongering, strike breaking and general nastiness.
Any study of these issues in Britain in the 1980s-90s can point to Sun headlines to demonstrate this.
