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Dr John Coulter ✍ The annual Alliance Party conference had a lot of pomp and pageantry about what it will do for the people of Northern Ireland come the May 2027 council and Assembly polls, but one question is still eluding the electorate - when will the party come clean on its new-found republican roots?

Of course, spokespeople will be wheeled out to champion the soundbite that Alliance is currently neutral on the constitution and the Union, and prides itself in the propaganda that it is supposedly a ‘middle of the road, centrist’ party.

Long gone are the days when if you wanted to avoid a political debate, you simply said: “I’m Alliance!” Long gone, too, is the perception - especially under the leadership of my schoolboy chum and fellow Presbyterian minister’s son Lord John Alderdice - that Alliance was a ‘soft U’ Unionist party.

In those days, Alliance’s power base was in traditionally Unionist constituencies east of the River Bann. But in the years under current boss Naomi Long, Alliance realised that if it was to become a significant third force in Northern Ireland politics behind Unionism and Nationalism, it would have to expand west of the Bann.

But therein lies the problem for Alliance. How do you ride two political horses at once who are pulling in opposite directions? How do you get moderate Unionists to vote for you thinking you are a ‘soft U’ Unionist movement, whilst at the same time convincing SDLP and Sinn Fein voters to transfer to you under the guise that you are a ‘soft R’ republican party?

It prompts the question - will the real Alliance Party please stand up? Indeed, when will moderate Unionists waken up to the reality that Alliance has hitched its caravan to the pan nationalist front of Dublin, Sinn Fein and the SDLP?

Alliance sent a clear message about its new-found republican and Left-wing roots to the pro-Union community by having Andy Burnham, the controversial Left-wing Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester as a keynote speaker at its recent conference.

The message is simple as to where Alliance - coming into the 2027 elections - now stands. Forget the ‘middle of the road’ spin. Constitutionally, Alliance has now taken over the ground once occupied by the now defunct democratic nationalist movement, the Irish Independence Party. Ideologically, it is occupying the ground once held by the now defunct Northern Ireland Labour Party. Alliance is no longer a liberal party.

Another horse Alliance seeks to ride out of its political stable is that it has become an openly environmentally friendly party in a bid to soak up the Green Party vote in Northern Ireland.

Alliance may be looking over its shoulder at the seeming resurgence of the Ulster Unionists under Jon Burrows, a trend which could see moderate Unionists who used Alliance in the past as a protest vote returning to the UUP fold.

Over the other shoulder, Alliance may be keeping an eye if the trend in mainland Britain where the Greens are having an electoral boost could make its way across the Irish Sea in time for the May 2027 showdown. Put bluntly, could Alliance be squashed electorally between a Green Party bounce and new-found UUP bounce?

Alliance also has the problem of being unable to retain its Westminster seats. It currently has only one MP - Sorcha Eastwood in the traditionally Unionist seat of Lagan Valley.

Having lived in that constituency for 28 years myself, she only won the seat because of a fairly even three-way split in Unionism and tactical voting by republicans. If Unionism can reach an accommodation on an agreed candidate, Alliance in Lagan Valley will suffer the same electoral fate as it has suffered in the past in East Belfast and North Down - losing the seat to a Unionist.

With much talk about realignment in Unionism currently taking place, Alliance must be asking itself - is there room in the pan nationalist front for a third nationalist party?

With Unionism holding discussions on transferring to one another in the May 2027 polls, can Alliance reach an accommodation with the SDLP and Sinn Fein on transfers, or has the Alliance bubble finally started to leak air at a rapid rate?

Has courting the nationalist vote west of the Bann backfired on Alliance? Is Alliance now seen as too nationalist to attract moderate pro-Union voters? And if Alliance tries to rebrand itself yet again as a ‘soft U’ Unionist party, is that the end of republican transfers from the pan nationalist front?

Whilst there has been much talk of a so-called border poll, one is not likely before May 2027. But at some point over the next several months, Alliance will have to finally come clean on where it stands on the Union.

The danger for Alliance is that this debate between the rival factions in the party - namely, the pan nationalist front element who favour Irish unity, and the traditional Lord Alderdice-style ‘soft U’ Unionists - could pull the party asunder in the same way as the Good Friday Agreement created the rival Yes and No camps in the UUP during the Lord Trimble era.
 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Alliance Must Come Clean On Its Republican Roots

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Nineteen

 

A Morning Thought @ 3094

Anthony McIntyre ☠ For ten hours last week, the former IRA leader Gerry Adams took to the witness box of a London court to deny that he was the former IRA leader Gerry Adams.

Given the allegations made against him, the presiding judge might have felt he was listening to Harold Shipman deny that he was ever a doctor. Like Shipman, the allegations about a body count have been persistent, the Belfast Telegraph 
proclaiming in the immediate wake of his Dublin libel case, Gerry Adams is a man of towering ambition who’d no moral qualms about securing his goal through murder. If the accusations against Adams were upheld as being true - that he was a member of the IRA army council - then critics would feel free to contend that he has been responsible for even more autopsies than Shipman. 

In the end the London case against Adams collapsed, giving him not quite his preferred outcome which was a dismissal of the claim on the basis of the evidence before the court. Still, he got a much better result than the claimants who had issued the proceedings against him. And it must be conceded that in his post-court media interview in Belfast he spoke truthfully about one matter - the claimants had been badly advised from the outset - leaving the observer to wonder if they were prompted to take the case by the same element that badly advised them.

While some of the Trump-style lying in London opened him to ridicule - as in his nonsensical contention that he was not the author of the Brownie columns - apologists for Adams have long insisted that he must deny IRA membership otherwise he would be prosecuted and imprisoned. Yet, as Brendan Hughes observed in the H Blocks some months before his release in 1986, he would not expect Adams to admit membership for that very reason, but went on to point out the obvious: a mere 'no comment' would suffice to prevent prosecution. There was no need to lie about membership.

The real reason for the unrelenting organised lying is arguably the need to give cover to those movers, shakers and gatekeepers in the world of politics who could open doors to an extended and enhanced political career for Adams whereby he could prance around as Percy Pompous on the national and international stage, a human rights champion, a statesman, so long as he kept his end of the bargain and strangled the IRA, forcing it to accept British terms for disengagement - unity only by consent. In rendering himself a major asset (as distinct from an agent) to the rich and powerful of this world, his disavowal of IRA membership made it easier for them to open doors for the man they could do business with, while simultaneously serving as the lubricant with which he could oil the wheels of his political career.

Does the London ruling change anything? Not in the slightest. Nobody who last Sunday believed Adams to have been in the IRA believe this Sunday that he was not in it. Even had he lost it would have changed the minds of no one. A judgement that he had been a member of the IRA would have been less uncomfortable for him than it would have been for the British state. A court finding against Adams would have left the state exposed for having - despite all its protestations to the contrary that it had never talked with 'terrorists' - previously negotiated with a person legally acknowledged as an IRA figure, even allowing him to cross the threshold of 10 Downing Street. For the British, better that such is left judicially unsaid. 

Perhaps the institutional instinct of the judge kicked in. As a barrister Jonathan Swift's “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”, so he was well positioned to readily understand  how any ruling was likely to play out. He, rather than the Adams legal team, raised the issue of a possible abuse of process which in the end relieved him of any responsibility to make a determination on the merits of the case. While much less robust on the bombings of English cities the evidence of membership seemed pretty compelling in circumstances where only a balance of probability slope had to be scaled in order to reach the summit of culpability. So, while Adams rails against the British establishment's supposed involvement in the case, that same establishment secured the outcome most suitable to it. The London court case was no battle between Gerry Adams and the British state, but a common purpose enterprise that both satisfied and sanctified the preservation of a legal fiction  beneficial to both.

Gerry Adams is fortunate. He lied for Ireland into his seventies while others died for it in their teens and twenties. He was regarded by key colleagues as an effective, ruthless and courageous, but ultimately unsuccessful IRA leader. The guerrilla organisation of which he is reputed to have been chief of staff in 1977-78 spent almost thirty years replacing the unity only by consent principle with . . . the unity only by consent principle: a truth as irrefutable as it is uncomfortable for those who prefer to mystify it by seeking validation not in breaking from London but through lying in London. 

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Shipman And Adams

Ukraine Solidarity Group ✊ A Digest of News from Ukrainian Sources ⚔ 16-March-2026.

In this week’s bulletin

⬤ Ukraine union leader interviewed.
⬤ Dnipro miners.
⬤ UN defines Russian crimes against humanity.
⬤ Militarism and defence of Ukraine.
⬤ Sanctions-busters identified.
 ⬤ Civilians tortured to death.

News from the territories occupied by Russia

29 civilians abducted from Kherson oblast were tortured to death or died from lack of treatment in Russian captivity (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 13th)

Russia sentences Crimean to 15 years for sharing information available on Google Maps (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 13th)

The Face of Resistance: Crimean Tatar Activist Eskender Suleimanov (Crimea Platform, March 13th)

I repeated it like a prayer: ‘Donbas is Ukraine! ’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 12th)

Russia’s deportation and enforced disappearances of Ukrainian children are crimes against humanity – UN Commission (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 12th).

Ukrainian political prisoner faces new 'trial' and life sentence for opposing Russia's occupation of Crimea (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 11th)

Weekly Update On The Situation In Occupied Crimea (Crimea Platform, March 10th)

Occupiers are blackmailing the families of prisoners of war by demanding they register Starlink terminals in their names (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 10th)

10-year sentence for love of Ukraine against 71-year-old pensioner under Russian occupation (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 10th)

Crimean Tatar political prisoner with a malignant brain tumour forced to sign a fake ‘clean bill of health’ (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 9th)

Russia sentences 69-year-old Ukrainian pensioner to 11 years for sending money to Ukraine (Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, March 9th)

Ukrainian PoW fined for “discrediting” Russian army during 18-year sentence (Mediazona, 3 March)

News from Ukraine

Train as a Witness (Tribunal for Putin, March 13th)

Russian Forces Attack Trade Union Office and Bus Carrying Miners in Dnipropetrovsk Region (Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, March 11th)

3,000 women march in wartime Kyiv demanding rights the state is rewriting (Euromaidan, March 9th)

“Change is inevitable” and Free Iryna Danylovych: the ZMINA team joined the Women’s March to become the voice of women prisoners held by the Kremlin (Zmina, March 8th)

'We work to gather coal': Ukraine's mines are war's second frontline (Sianushka writes, March 7th)

Dispatch from Ukraine (Krytyka, March 2026)

‘The part of our work – and truly of my life – which is connected with war is never ending’ (Unison magazine, February 26th)

Saving Putin from justice. Who in Europe is stalling the trial and who is helping Ukraine (European Pravda, February 26th)

War-related news from Russia

The War on Poverty (Russian Reader, March 14th)

“Join the elite drone forces, and you’ll come home famous!”: Russian universities are luring students into paid military service (The Insider, March 13th)

Lost in translation: How Russia’s new elite hit squad was compromised by an idiotic lapse in tradecraft (The Insider, March 13th)

Polina Yevtushenko: 14 years behind bars for nothing (The Russian Reader, 12 March)

The Insider identifies 6,000 exporters trading with sanctioned Russian firms or defense industry suppliers, 4,000 of them based in China (The Insider, March 11th)

Pro-war bloggers welcome arrest of Sergey Shoigu’s top deputy as Russia’s Defense Ministry purge continues (Meduza, March 9th)

A phantom refinery: How Georgia helps Putin bypass oil sanctions (The Insider, March 9th)

Our Dear Friends in Moscow: from journalists to propagandists (Posle.Media, 4 March)

Analysis and comment

Sultana Is Right About Zelensky. Now What? (Red Mole, March 13th)

Trump’s US temporarily lifts sanctions on Russian oil (Meduza, 13 March)

European socialism, imperial militarism and defence of Ukraine (People and Nature, March 12th)

Russia’s war: stop trying to delegitimise resistance (People and Nature, March 12th)

The US-Russia-Ukraine negotiations: Architecture of tactical theatre and strategic deception (New Eastern Europe, March 9th)

Interview with Andriy Movchan: "If the Occupation of Ukraine Is an Acceptable Price, What Else Is Acceptable? (Europe Solidaire, March 8th)

Presentation of the Research “Words that Kill: How Russian Propaganda Shapes Mobilization and Combat Motivation” (Lingva Lexa, February 27th)

Putin’s Four Antifascist Myths (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, May 2025)

Research of human rights abuses

UN concludes that forcible transfer of children and enforced disappearances are crimes against humanity (UN Commissioner for Human Rights, 12 March)

International Criminal Justice: Beautiful Myth or Imperfect Reality? (Tribunal for Putin, March 10th)

International solidarity

“That’s How We Founded the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign”: An Interview with Chris Ford (Commons.com, March 12th)

Art Exhibition on Crimea Opens in Warsaw (Crimea Platform, March 11th)

Upcoming events

Saturday 28 March: Together March in London – Eastern European bloc against the far right, meeting 12.0 midday at Deanery Street, off Park Lane.

Wednesday 15 April, 6.0-7:30 pm. Try Me for Treason: Voices Against Putin's War - Part of the Think Human Festival 2026 Actors will perform extracts from speeches made from the dock by Russian oppositionists who have been tried for sabotage for actions taken against the Russo-Ukrainian war Clerici Building, Clerici Learning Studio, Oxford Brookes University, Headington Campus, Oxford.


🔴This bulletin is put together by labour movement activists in solidarity with Ukrainian resistance. More information at Ukraine Information Group.

We are also on twitter. Our aim is to circulate information in English that to the best of our knowledge is reliable. If you have something you think we should include, please send it to 2U022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com.


We are now on Facebook and Substack! Please subscribe and tell friends. Better still, people can email us at 2022ukrainesolidarity@gmail.com, and we’ll send them the bulletin direct every Monday. The full-scale Russian assault on Ukraine is going into its third year: we’ll keep information and analysis coming, for as long as it takes.

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News From Ukraine 💣 Bulletin 187

Friendly Atheist ★ Hank Kunneman said "even Jesus was concerned about going to certain ports and airports."

On Sunday, Nebraska preacher and self-proclaimed “prophet” Hank Kunneman told his followers at Lord of Hosts Church that he needed everyone to contribute to a brand new “travel fund” so that he can fly to various cities on a private jet.

Because commercial flight is just too damn difficult for people like him.

After making his usual requests for tithes, Kunneman launched into a separate request for a special “travel-the-world fund.” You see, recently, he was flying to Idaho, but his flight was delayed 10 hours. The problem, he concluded, wasn’t the weather or the specific airline. It was flying commercial in general.

The difference [between me and the rest of you] is I can’t afford, with my schedule and what I’m doing, to be your pastor here… to be stuck in an airport somewhere and be gone for three [or] four days. Or not get back for Sunday.

So he told his wife he had made an “executive decision”: 'I’m gonna charter a jet. Because I am so dedicated to God . . . '

Nebraska "Prophet" Says God Needs Him To Have Access To A Private Jet

Right Wing Watch 👀Written by Kyle Mantyla.

Dale Partridge Seeks To Repeal The 19th Amendment In The Next Decade



Far-right Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge joined antisemitic pastors Calvin Robinson and Joel Webbon on the latter's program last week where he announced that, like Robinson, he too has a book coming out on Webbon's NXR imprint in the near future..

Partridge is a vocal advocate of instituting biblical patriarchy in America, so it was no surprise to learn that his book will be titled "19 Reasons to Repeal the 19th Amendment," which is what gave women the right to vote in 1920.

Partridge said that his book will expose:

the damage that has been done through the 19th Amendment, and why it's not just wrong against scripture—coming from a biblical patriarchal perspective—but why it's never been done throughout history from any other nation.

"Any other nation that embraces such a view where you're putting women in charge of making decisions for a particular nation, that nation falls," Partridge claimed. "I think there's going to be a lot of evidence, a lot of research [that] women suffer more from women's suffrage."

Continue @ RWW.

'Good Christian Sexism'

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Eighteen

 

Pastords @ 36

 

A Morning Thought @ 3093

Maryam Namazie🎤 Interview On Iran’s Revolution In The Shadow Of War: 16-March-2026

In this interview, Maryam Namazie argues that the central conflict in Iran is not a proxy war between states but a social struggle between the Islamic Republic and Iranian society. She situates the 2025–2026 protests within decades of uprisings and highlights the role of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, labour struggles and student activism. Namazie criticises both sections of the Western Left that dismiss the protests as foreign manipulation and pro-war voices that frame military escalation as liberation. Overall, the interview presents the Iranian uprising as a socially rooted struggle for democratic freedoms and equality whose outcome will ultimately depend on the internal dynamics of Iranian society rather than external geopolitical intervention.

Hein Htet Kyaw: Given the situation in Iran, what is your analysis of the revolution and the current war? Sections of the western Left are conflating the Dey uprising with Israeli and western imperialism. I can also see sections of the Right calling for western and Israeli intervention and defending the war. Can you please explain this?

Maryam Namazie: The main conflict in Iran is not between the Islamic regime and foreign powers. It is between the Islamic regime and the people who have been rising up against it for decades. The struggle in Iran is not a proxy war between states but a social revolution against a theocratic regime.

For decades, people in Iran have risen up repeatedly, including in 1999, 2009, 2017-18, 2019, 2022 and during the Dey (December-January) protests of 2025-26. Each wave has broadened socially and has become a widespread movement against the Islamic regime.

Since the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising in particular, women have played a central role in resisting the regime’s system of sex apartheid. Compulsory veiling and the policing of women’s bodies are not marginal policies but ideological pillars of the Islamic regime, which is why women’s resistance has sparked broader social revolt.

This ongoing revolutionary movement was not created by Israel, the United States, or any outside power. It is rooted in lived conditions inside Iran: sex apartheid, compulsory veiling, mass executions, crushed labour movements, unpaid wages, economic dispossession, inflation, corruption, and a regime that governs through sheer violence.

External actors may try to instrumentalise unrest and protests for their own strategic purposes, just as the regime tries to brand every protest as a foreign conspiracy in order to justify repression. In moments of geopolitical conflict, revolutions from below are often distorted or appropriated by states that seek to claim them as part of their own strategic agendas. The current war creates exactly this danger. A socially rooted revolution risks being overshadowed and misrepresented as merely another front in a conflict between states.

Citizen Lab, for example, documented an Israeli-linked operation using fake accounts and AI-generated material aimed at shaping public opinion. A recent academic study found that only about 17% of protest slogans in thousands of videos referred to “Shah” or “Pahlavi” during the Dey protests, while 83% were broader anti-Islamic Republic demands; yet diaspora broadcasters like Iran International heavily overrepresented monarchist narratives.

Even so, instrumentalization is not the same as orchestration. Khamenei, for example, instrumentalised Black Lives Matter, but that doesn’t mean BLM was orchestrated by the regime. Russia and China are manipulating US politics but that doesn’t mean protests against ICE are Chinese or Russian creations.

Reducing socially rooted revolts to foreign conspiracies is one of the main ways those in power attempt to hijack or neutralise popular struggles. This kind of distortion does not exist only within authoritarian regimes. It also appears in international debates about Iran.

We see this in a section of the Western “anti-imperialist” Left that has completely abandoned the people of Iran, the working class, and progressive political and social movements in the country. They have reduced anti-imperialism to a caricature. Their starting point is not social movements or the working class, but states. In this framework, the political subject shifts. The people disappear and the state takes their place.

The logic becomes simple: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And that “friend” almost always turns out to be a ruling elite rather than the oppressed.

Therefore, if a regime is anti-western, it is “good” and part of the “resistance” like the Islamic regime in Iran. If it is not anti-Western, then it is “bad,” like the Saudi regime, though both regimes are anti-working class and authoritarian.

This has nothing to do with solidarity and reflects a narrow Eurocentric and racist worldview that centres Western power struggles while treating the struggles of people living under non-Western authoritarian regimes as secondary or irrelevant. In the West, therefore, some march for women’s rights whilst also defending an anti-woman regime in Iran. They speak about workers’ rights while legitimising a state that considers labour strikes haram and imprisons and flogs labour activists for organising 1 May.

The Islamic regime understands this well and wraps itself in the language of anti-imperialism while enforcing one of the most misogynistic systems of governance in the world. A state that executes dissidents and rules through clerical authority suddenly becomes “anti-imperialist” in the eyes of those who would never tolerate such brutality at home.

Interestingly, though, this debate is usually framed almost entirely around the failures of the Left. While endless attention is directed at marginal currents on the Left, the Right – which actually holds state power, runs armies and conducts wars, with all the means of communication at its disposal – continues to burn the world down, largely unchallenged.

Islamism in Iran, for example, is often blamed on the Left, yet Right-wing Western governments played a major role in legitimising Islamism during the final stages of the Shah’s collapse. At the 1979 Guadeloupe conference, Western leaders effectively accepted that the Shah’s rule was over and began preparing for a political transition in which Islamist forces would play a central role. During the Cold War, Western powers often supported Islamist forces as part of a strategy to create a “green belt” of Islamist opposition to Soviet influence.

As usual, the US and Israel discover a passion for women’s rights when their bombs begin to fall. Empirically, though, we know that these bombs have not produced democratic societies in the region. Their “liberation” in places like Iraq or Afghanistan has meant devastation, sectarian fragmentation, authoritarian resurgence and mass suffering. There is also a deep irony in the Israeli and US religious-Right governments presenting themselves as guarantors of Iranian freedom when their genocide in Gaza has normalised the large-scale destruction of civilian life and infrastructure.

In reality, war between states does not produce social emancipation. It destroys societies and strengthens and militarises the most reactionary forces on all sides. In such situations, authoritarian regimes often use the language of national security to intensify repression, silence dissent and push society into survival mode rather than political mobilisation. At the same time, foreign powers attempt to present military escalation as liberation. Both dynamics marginalise the very social forces inside the country that are struggling for freedom.

Those who cheer military escalation in the name of Iranian freedom are not interested in the rights and freedoms of the people of Iran any more than the anti-imperialist Left. For them, it is all geopolitics and self-interest, which erase the agency of the people and obscure the central political fact that the main conflict in Iran is not between the Islamic regime and foreign powers. It is between the Islamic regime and the people who are fighting to bring it to its knees. It is a struggle between society and the state.

Clearly, no government involved in this conflict is acting in the interests of Iranian civilians. The Islamic regime seeks survival and regional influence backed by China and Russia, while Western and regional powers pursue their own strategic calculations.

The future of Iran will not be decided by foreign governments or military escalation but by the social forces within Iranian society that are struggling for democratic change. This is particularly true of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution that threatens not only the regime but the architecture of power in the region and globally.

To sum up, the pro-Islamist Left dismisses the revolution as a Western plot. The pro-war Right tries to claim it as justification for military escalation. Both erase the agency of Iranian society.

A people’s revolution belongs neither to imperial powers nor to reactionary states. It belongs to the people who risk prison, torture and execution every time they step into the streets.

Hein Htet Kyaw: How strong is the left in Iran at the moment?

Maryam Namazie: Under authoritarian conditions, the strength of the Left has to be measured differently. It cannot be measured by legal parties or formal political institutions but by its social presence.

The Islamic regime has spent decades imprisoning, executing and driving into exile leftists, trade unionists, student organisers and feminist activists. Independent unions are banned and labour organising is treated as a national security issue. International labour rights monitors such as the ITUC Global Rights Index consistently rank Iran among the worst countries in the world for workers’ rights.

Despite this repression, the Left survives and expresses itself through social struggles rather than party structures.

One important exception is Iranian Kurdistan, where Left and socialist political traditions have remained more organisationally visible. Kurdish parties such as the Communist Party of Iran maintain political structures and historical roots in the region, and Kurdish activists in many cities have been at the forefront of numerous protests, including the uprising sparked by the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini. The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” emerged from Kurdish struggles, particularly within the Kurdish women’s movement and the experience of Rojava.

If you look at the demands emerging from Iranian society, namely workers demanding unpaid wages, teachers and pensioners protesting poverty, women challenging compulsory veiling and sex apartheid, students resisting privatisation, campaigns against executions and for the freedom of political prisoners, these are fundamentally social and egalitarian demands. In substance they reflect the politics of equality, social justice and secularism traditionally associated with the Left.

The 2023 “Charter of Minimum Demands” by 20 independent trade and civil society organisations illustrates this clearly. The charter tied together women, students, school students, teachers, workers, families seeking justice, writers, LGBT and the wider public in a common framework of demands for political freedom, social equality and democratic rights.

Despite systematic repression, labour protest in Iran is persistent and widespread across sectors ranging from oil and petrochemicals to steel, transportation, education and agriculture.

The Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) recorded at least 725 worker protests and 1,378 worker strikes in 2024, while the Center for Human Rights in Iran documented major labour rallies in at least 14 cities between March and July 2024 and strikes in more than 115 oil and gas companies between 19 June and 1 July 2024. These figures show that labour protest in Iran is persistent, widespread and structurally crucial.

One of the most important labour struggles of the past decade has been the Haft Tappeh sugarcane workers’ movement in Khuzestan against corruption, privatisation and months of unpaid wages, which has produced well-known activists such as Esmaeil Bakhshi, a labour organiser who publicly exposed torture after his arrest, and Sepideh Gholian, a journalist and labour activist who reported on the strikes and became a prominent symbol of resistance after repeated imprisonment.

Another key labour organisation is the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Workers’ Syndicate. Its leaders Reza Shahabi and Ebrahim Madadi have spent years in prison for organising workers and demanding the right to independent unions. Despite this repression, the union continues to represent one of the most visible examples of independent labour organising in Iran.

Teachers’ unions have also played a central role in recent protests. Activists such as Mohammad Habibi and Esmail Abdi have been imprisoned for organising nationwide teachers’ strikes demanding fair wages, improved education funding and the release of detained colleagues. These protests have mobilised thousands of educators across Iran.

Women’s struggles have also increasingly connected demands against compulsory veiling and sex apartheid and for bodily autonomy with broader demands for equality and social justice. This includes documenting cases of “honour killings” and domestic violence, and challenging both patriarchal social norms and the legal structures that enable violence against women. Women have played a significant role in anti-execution activism. One important example is the Mothers of Khavaran, who for decades have demanded truth and accountability for the mass executions of political prisoners in the 1980s. Many of those executed were Leftist activists whose bodies were buried in mass graves at Khavaran. Their struggle represents one of the longest-running movements for justice and memory in Iran.

Students have also historically played a central role in democratic movements. In October 2024, for example, students at the University of Tehran protested against privatisation and sex segregation. Student activism in Iran frequently combines anti-authoritarian, anti-market and egalitarian politics, with strong overlap with the historic student Left.

At the same time, the Iranian Left in exile is not a coherent political bloc. Decades of repression have fragmented organisations inside the country, and exile politics is often marked by sectarianism and division. Nonetheless, the Left remains present as a social force. It is stronger in labour struggles than many outside observers realise, more organisationally visible in parts of Kurdistan, deeply imprinted in student anti-authoritarian movements, and inseparable from the most radical edge of the women’s movement.

The Iranian Left today, therefore, is heavily repressed but socially influential in the struggles of workers, women, students, minority rights and political prisoners who continue to challenge the foundations of the state.

Focusing only on exile politics or satellite television debates erases the role of the Left and produces a distorted picture. Monarchist or Right-wing opposition groups heavily rely on social media and satellite TV stations funded by Gulf states and Israel to appear as the only visible alternative internationally. But if we look at what people inside Iran are risking prison, torture and death for – labour rights, women’s equality, freedom from dictatorship, the abolition of executions and the right to organise – the political weight of the struggle lies with Left, egalitarian and emancipatory demands.

And the fact that the regime continues to imprison labour leaders, student activists and feminist organisers tells us something important. States do not spend decades crushing movements that are irrelevant. They repress the ones they fear most.

Hein Htet Kyaw: Some say political Islam has social democratic style left-wing elements such as charity, and welfare systems. What do you think of it? As a Marxist and feminist, does political Islam fall into the left, or right?

Maryam Namazie: Political Islam is a Right-wing movement. Charity does not change that. Churches run soup kitchens too; that does not make the Vatican or the evangelical churches across the US socialist or the Christian-Right emancipatory. The real question is not whether a movement distributes aid but what kind of social order it creates and what relations of power it enforces.

The distinction between Left and Right is not about charity or welfare. It is about whether a political project expands human freedom and equality or preserves hierarchy and authority. The Left historically emerged from struggles against monarchy, clerical rule, patriarchy and class domination. Political Islam organises society around divine authority, clerical power, censorship, moral policing and punishment of dissent. It is also based on a system of sex apartheid: compulsory veiling, sex segregation, unequal rights in marriage and inheritance, and the policing of women’s bodies and sexuality. These are not marginal practices; they are pillars of the political order. Control over women’s bodies is central to how hierarchical systems reproduce themselves. When half the population is restricted, the entire society becomes easier to discipline. A political system that requires the subordination of women in order to function cannot meaningfully belong to the Left.

It is also important to understand how charity operates politically. Throughout modern history many conservative or authoritarian movements have built welfare networks while preserving hierarchy. Fascist regimes such as Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany organised large welfare programmes and mass aid campaigns while destroying trade unions and democratic rights. Islamist movements often operate in a similar way. They build networks of charity, clinics or welfare assistance, but these exist within a political project that suppresses dissent, restricts women’s freedom and limits independent worker organisation. Charity is a form of patronage and social control. It is used, including in Western democracies, to pacify and depoliticise people’s struggles.

There is also a racism in the way this issue is often framed. In Europe no one argues that the Christian-Right should govern society simply because churches provide charity. Yet when the same logic is applied to Muslim-majority countries, religious rule is suddenly described as authentic or even progressive. This produces one standard of freedom for people in the West and another for people elsewhere. It is racist cultural relativism dressed up as respect.

Finally, the framing itself erases the diversity of people who live in Muslim-majority societies. “Muslims” are not a political bloc. There are workers, women, religious and sexual minorities, secularists, socialists, atheists, trade unionists and countless others who are fighting both authoritarian states and religious-Right movements.

Charity can exist under many ideologies, even fascism. What defines the Left is not charity but active participation and organisation in emancipation. A political project that depends on religious authority, patriarchal control and the suppression of dissent belongs on the Right. The Left is about expanding human freedom and equality; Islamism organises society around hierarchy and obedience.

As an aside, people sometimes say that Left and Right no longer exist. Usually what they mean is that traditional political parties have collapsed or that the political landscape has become more fragmented. But the fundamental divide has not disappeared. As long as societies still contain hierarchies of class, sex and power, that divide remains very real.

Hein Htet Kyaw: Some say political Islam goes beyond nationalism since they consider all Muslims as the vanguard of the global Muslims as a social class. So, does it seem like “internationalism” to you? Or is that another form of “othering politics” as seen in the right-wing identitarian movements?

Maryam Namazie: Internationalism begins from universal human equality and solidarity across borders. It means the solidarity of workers and oppressed people across nations, sex, race, beliefs and ethnicities against systems of exploitation and domination. The slogan is “Workers of the World Unite,” not white workers unite or Muslim workers unite.

Islamism is not internationalism; it is identitarianism. Instead of solidarity across humanity, it divides the world into believers and unbelievers, ummah and kufar, moral and corrupt. That is not class politics. It replaces class solidarity with religious belonging and turns identity into the organising principle of politics.

This is why it mirrors white nationalists. Both Islamism and Right-wing white identitarian movements reduce people to identity. Both demand loyalty to a mythic community. Both are obsessed with purity, sex-based policing and internal enemies. In both cases politics becomes less about freedom or equality and more about defending the restrictive moral boundaries of the group.

Identity politics is a breeding ground for dehumanisation because it turns homogenised people into representatives of a category. Once people are reduced to categories: Muslim, non-Muslim, believer, apostate, insider, outsider, it becomes easier to justify discrimination, repression and violence in the name of “protecting” the community.

Islamism is not a form of internationalism. Internationalism is universalist; Islamism is communitarian. One expands solidarity across humanity, the other narrows politics to religious belonging. That is not internationalism. It is the globalisation of a Right-wing identity project.

Hein Htet Kyaw: I know for a fact that the ex-Muslim movement has a unique perspective which is different from the western privileged leftists given our rich experiences of struggling against the clerical right-wing regimes, authoritarian self-claiming socialist red brown regimes, and the white supremacist right-wingers. Since you’re one of the faces leading the ex-Muslim movement, do you want to pass down the Marxist understandings along the way? I think just being an ex-Muslim is not enough. Sometimes, it can be reactionary too. For example, some ex-Muslims openly supported the war crimes committed by the Israeli regime against the Palestinians since they hate the left-wing opportunists who are simply co-opted by the Islamists and echoing or downplaying the antisemitism within the Islamists. So, to avoid such reactionary politics of both left-opportunism and right-opportunism, we have to understand anti-imperialism, class analysis, and intersectionality, I believe. What do you think?

Maryam Namazie: The ex-Muslim movement is grounded in universal principles: freedom of conscience, secularism, equality before the law and the right to leave religion.

For that reason, we should be careful not to project onto the ex-Muslim movement a political programme that it does not claim to represent. It is a civil rights movement for the right to leave religion, the right to blaspheme, the right not to believe, the abolition of apostasy and blasphemy laws and freedom of conscience. In that sense it is closer to the gay rights movement than to a political party.

Just as being gay does not automatically make someone progressive, being ex-Muslim does not automatically produce a coherent emancipatory politics. Individuals within a movement will hold different political views and must be accountable for them as individuals. Saying that ex-Muslims are all neocons or far-Right enablers is no different from saying all Muslims are Islamists. Ex-Muslims as a category are not progressive any more than Muslims as a category are reactionary.

Part of the confusion comes from a failure to distinguish between identity as experience and identity as politics. Identity as experience means that someone leaves Islam and faces threats, stigma, exile, shunning and violence. That lived reality is the basis for a civil rights movement demanding freedom of conscience.

Identity as politics is different. It begins when that experience is turned into a politics of collective virtue simply by belonging to that identity. When identity becomes the organising principle of politics, it easily turns into tribalism.

This distinction is crucial because many activists assume a simple chain of reasoning: oppression produces identity, and identity produces political truth. In other words, because someone has experienced oppression, their political conclusions must automatically be morally or politically correct. History shows that this is not the case. Experiencing oppression does not immunise anyone from adopting reactionary politics.

This is also why I would say to ex-Muslims who demonise Muslims as a people, support racist immigration policies or cheer war, genocide and collective punishment that they are reproducing the very logic that oppressed them in the first place. Islamism treated ex-Muslims as traitors who deserved death simply for leaving Islam. When ex-Muslims begin to treat Muslims as a homogeneous enemy or justify violence against them, they repeat that same politics of collective blame and dehumanisation.

Opposition to Islamism must not become a mirror image of it. The aim is not to replace a Muslim ummah with an ex-Muslim ummah or tribe defined by hostility to believers. The ex-Muslim movement is not about creating a new identity group or political tribe. Leaving religion should expand human freedom, not simply replace one tribe with another.

Reactionary politics emerge when people abandon universal principles and replace them with identity politics. Undoubtedly, a civil rights movement cannot defend only its own in-group. Rights matter precisely because they apply to everyone. The aim is not to claim moral superiority but to insist that every human being deserves freedom of conscience and universal rights that apply equally to believers and non-believers alike.

Note: First published: Interview with Maryam Namazie on Iran’s Revolution in the Shadow of War, Libcom, 16 March 2026

Hein Htet Kyaw (Abu Bakr), the Director of Australasia for Atheist Alliance International and a spokesperson for Burmese Atheists, conducted an interview with Maryam Namazie, the Spokesperson for Fitnah – Movement for Women’s Liberation, One Law for All and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, concerning the ongoing war and the revolutionary protests in Iran throughout 2025 and 2026. 

Maryam Namazie is a  is a British-Iranian secularist,
communist and human rights activist, commentator, and broadcaster.

The Real Conflict In Iran

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