Poignantly, just hours after his beloved Arsenal won the league title, our friend and comrade Pat Atkinson passed away on 18 May, aged 73. Tributes highlight Pat’s generosity, humour and warmth – “a lovely man” is the phrase that comes up repeately.

This year’s local elections were a disaster for the capitalist establishment parties. The London borough of Haringey was no exception. Labour had controlled Haringey council since 1971.

Working-class people in Waltham Forest are in desperate need of change. The previous Labour council made millions of pounds of cuts and was punished at the elections. Now the Greens have gone from having no councillors to 31.

With the 100th anniversary of the 1926 General Strike and following the results of the recent local elections, people in Hackney descended on the CLR James Library to partake in a musical rendition of ‘The Singing Strikers’.

London Renters Union mobilised eviction resistance in Tower Hamlets on 16 May. The family facing the eviction had lived there for over 40 years, yet the greedy housing association refused to pass down the tenancy from the family’s late parents.

On 7 May, teachers and support staff in the National Education Union (NEU) at Highgate Wood School in Haringey, north London, began a series of strikes against a package of cuts planned by the school leadership.

We had an extraordinary campaign, filled with sympathetic support, and staunch agreement from those fed up of the major parties dancing around problems facing the working class.

I attended a councillor hustings for my ward, Bethnal Green West. The hustings was hosted by the Canal Club on the Wellington Estate – a community centre run by the tenants and residents association.