Strasbourg court rejects attempt to force government to investigate impact of Kremlin interference on elections

• UK politics live – latest updates

An attempt by three former MPs to force the UK government to hold an inquiry into the impact of Russian disinformation on the Brexit vote and other recent elections has failed at the European court of human rights.

The Strasbourg court ruled on Tuesday that countries had a “wide margin” in determining how to tackle attempts at electoral interference, and ruled against a case brought by Ben Bradshaw, Caroline Lucas and Alyn Smith.

Strasbourg court rejects attempt to force government to investigate impact of Kremlin interference on elections

• UK politics live – latest updates

An attempt by three former MPs to force the UK government to hold an inquiry into the impact of Russian disinformation on the Brexit vote and other recent elections has failed at the European court of human rights.

The Strasbourg court ruled on Tuesday that countries had a “wide margin” in determining how to tackle attempts at electoral interference, and ruled against a case brought by Ben Bradshaw, Caroline Lucas and Alyn Smith.

Links to enslavement, exploitation and opium make it ‘one of most important locations in history of global capitalism’

For more than 50 years it has been at the heart of cultural life in one of the UK’s biggest cities. But research has revealed Manchester’s Royal Exchange building was at the centre of slavery and colonialism, making it “one of the most important locations in the history of global capitalism”.

Since 1973, the building in St Ann’s Square has been home to the Royal Exchange theatre, now staging Liberation (until 26 July), the critically acclaimed play marking 80 years since the 1945 Pan-African Congress – a conference that brought together luminaries of Black liberation, including Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and WEB Du Bois, in Manchester to progress national independence movements from European rule.

Democrats need to win back the working class in 2028. Our research shows what does and doesn’t work

To win in 2028, Democrats need to win back a lot of working-class voters, including a lot of blue-collar Donald Trump voters. Doing so requires dispensing with some long-held myths that have captured the minds of Democratic party strategists. The first is that persuading working-class Trump supporters is a waste of time. They are – so the story goes – so totally absorbed in Magaland that there is no winning them back. Why bother? On the flip side, some liberals insist that some of these voters are winnable, if only Democrats can make themselves more like Trump by embracing tax cuts and tough talk. A third notion, favored by progressives, says that if liberals just crank the progressive economic message up to eleven, blue-collar voters will come running home.

The truth is, none of these strategies are particularly useful. Because none of them take working-class interests, values and attitudes seriously enough. Fortunately, new research from the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) can help shed light on what working-class voters actually want. And it can offer the Democrats a path out of the wilderness.

Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics

Despite their skills, careers and vast amount of knowledge, I often fail to see their adult selves fully formed

I am spending a lot of time at my late mother’s house, sorting things out, wondering why she had so much asafoetida and thinking about the past. Every time I’m there, my sister asks me to water the garden, and I never do. Then she says: “Please, just do the window boxes, otherwise the plants will die,” and I still don’t. “I may come and take the potted plants away, or you could take some, if you want to kill them in your own house?”, she says, and still I ignore her, because I don’t know anything about gardening. So it follows that, being my sibling, she doesn’t either. No amount of evidence to the contrary – her own, frankly magnificent garden – can convince me otherwise.

This is a two-way street. She is a fashion designer and exquisite draughtsperson – which I, also, after many decades, have yet to wrap my head around – but she can’t drive, and if ever she is a passenger when I’m driving, she is on red alert, pointing out things – mainly other cars, pedestrians, trees – as if, without her intervention, I would plough straight into them. Our brother is a skilled decorator and, when he uses words such as “primer” and “dust sheet”, I can’t help looking at him as if a cat is talking. He is a photographer by profession, and, even if we point the same phone at the same object, he creates images that are unfathomably deeper and more pleasing than mine. I look on this not so much as a knowledge base he has that I don’t, and more like an act of hocus-pocus. My other brother is a maths teacher, my other sister is a physicist, and I cannot describe how fanciful I find it that they may really be doing these jobs. Obviously, I have to pretend to believe it. I don’t even know whether you get wired in childhood to think all knowledge is equally distributed because otherwise it isn’t fair, or that every fine difference in skillset is just a question of whoever is younger catching up. But no amount of adulthood can overturn it.