Phil Hearse

Phil Hearse - From the 1980s until his death in California on October 22, Mike Davis was among the most influential Marxist theorists writing in the English language.

The war in Ukraine has provoked sharp differences among people on the left and peace activists. Federico Fuentes spoke to veteran British socialist and Anti*Capitalist Resistance member Phil Hearse about how these differences reflect deep underlying controversies about the world crisis.

Last week the Mirror newspaper exposed the case of an 87-year-old man, a sufferer of prostate cancer, who waited 15 hours for an ambulance after falling outside his house in Cornwall. Unable to move him, his family built a makeshift tent to keep off the rain. Conservative Party leadership contenders Rishi Sunak and Liz Trust have solutions for the NHS crisis—lots more privatisation. This means that you will now only wait 15 hours for an ambulance if you don’t have the right health insurance—in other words, if you are poor.

Although Liz Truss has largely succeeded in outflanking her rival Rishi Surnak to the right[1] on economic policy, by contrast on social issues[2] and foreign policy Surnak and Truss have played a game of right-wing leapfrog, each dragging the other successively toward more hard-line positions.