Our new fortnightly formula

From this issue Solidarity will be fortnightly, rather than weekly, with what we hope is a sharper and more accessible design. Solidarity will be expanded to 24 pages and the cover price will increase to £2 with a £1 concessionary rate, from £1/50p.

The change follows a decision by our last conference (April this year) to rebalance our staff resources towards more political organising.

All other things being equal, we would prefer to keep a weekly newspaper and crank up our organising, but a fortnightly paper, expanded in size, has the advantage of allowing a focus on history, education and background articles. This is a good fit for new activists who want to understand how the left can be more effective against the far right. Moreover our longer-perspective activities of education and political advocacy will be the staple of what we need to say in the near future.

Agitation

Times for more day-by-day agitation will come, but probably, for now, only exceptionally and locally. We will produce supplements to cover specific campaigns in the labour movement.

Our own experience in the past, when we’ve had a fortnightly routine for our main publication, has shown us that it can underpin a vigorous weekly tempo of activity: weekly street stalls, weekly door-to-door sales and selling to workmates, friends and other activists.

We note that the NPA-R in France, Socialist Alternative in Australia, or even the RCP in Britain, all manage reasonably fast-paced routines with a fortnightly paper.

We plan to increase our capacity in our office. New people have joined our small team in the last year, another will join us next year. But building up capacity will take time. We aspire to be a revolutionary socialist organisation which can make interventions and initiatives, convincing, inspiring, and arguing for our politics in all sorts of more ambitious ways. It will include more educational activities, speaking tours, better interventions on big demonstrations, etc., running campaigns.

Going fortnightly will free some capacity for us to do more of this work in 2026.