John Foot

On 5 June 1975, four carabinieri officers, in one car, drove up a winding road to an isolated farmhouse above Acqui Terme in northern Italy. We still don’t know if it was a routine search or if they had received a tip-off. While the driver was parking the car, the other three walked towards the main building. There were two cars parked outside. The carabinieri knocked on the door, a man opened it and a woman appeared at a window above. Moments later, the man at the door threw a hand grenade. One of the carabinieri, Umberto Rocca, lost an eye and an arm. What happened next has been the subject of controversy ever since.

Under the UK’s grotesque electoral system, a national breakthrough by a small party is more or less impossible. But in the new constituency of Bristol Central, the Green Party leader Carla Denyer is running Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire very close in the polls. Accounts of the race in the national press often recreate stereotypes of Bristol being somehow alternative, ‘bohemian’, quirky, as if voting Green were a bourgeois eccentricity reserved for people who play lyres and wear purple shirts. But the Green wave in Bristol has been a long time coming, and has its roots in disaffection with the way the city has been run at a local level. It also tells us something instructive about Labour in power, which may prefigure what happens when Keir Starmer takes over as prime minister in July.