Geography Archives: Britain

To describe the present upsurge of fascism as nationalist or populist would be misleading. Neither is it a replication of the fascism of the 1930s. However, it is marked by four features, which have been common to all fascist upsurges in the past, namely: rise of supremacism, apotheosis of unreason, proliferation of fascism as a movement, and intertwining of fascist movement and corporate capital.

An exploration of Bernal’s contribution to the politicization of science and scientists, above all the development of the Social Relations of Science movement.

With Amazon’s stock surging to well over $1,000 a share, and its head recently crowned the richest person in the world, the stakes for putting Amazon and Bezos in a critical light couldn’t be higher. Yet time and again, the pillars of US media provide them all the critical rigor a high school paper typically provides the spring dance committee.

I just don’t get why Jeremy Corbyn is so popular.

While we busy ourselves with creating a more green and climate friendly lifestyle, an astonishing 100 companies are responsible for producing 71 percent of carbon emissions. The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action.

Naomi Klein interviews Jeremy Corbyn on his ideas of progression in Britain, the disgusting actions and speeches by President Donald Trump, and the triumph of the campaign.

Spending cuts, deregulation, outsourcing: between them they have turned a state supposedly there to protect and support citizens into a machine to make money for the rich while punishing the poor. It’s never described like that, of course. Class warfare is passed off as book-keeping. Accountability is tossed aside for “commercial confidentiality”, while profiteering is dressed up as economic dynamism. One courtesy we should pay the victims of Grenfell is to drop the glossy-brochure euphemisms. Let’s get clear what happened to them: an act of social murder, straight out of Victorian times.

A limited partial breach has been made in the neoliberal edifice, through the demonstration by Corbyn, McDonnell and their allies that a programme and leadership that challenges these orthodoxies and proposes alternatives to them can do better electorally than those which conform to it.

When it came to the general election in Britain, everything was settled in advance. The Conservative Party led by Theresa May was supposed to prevail. The Labour Party, victim of its own confusion, its refusal to support the will of millions of members and voters who wanted to put an end to the straitjacket of the European Union, was supposed to be trounced.

It must be part of a bold and insurgent campaign based on resistance to racism, austerity and war that focusses on mass rallies and mobilisations. Giving in to the right can only make it weaker.

As the SKWAWKBOX examined this morning, Labour spokesman and front-bencher Barry Gardiner has become one of the sensations of the General Election campaign so far, with his charming but emphatic handling of various mainstream media interviewers.

On a recent visit to Britain, Noam Chomsky explained that an “extremely hostile media” is damaging Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal, and as a result is responsible for Corbyn’s unpopularity.

First a bit of context on how we got here. Scotland was united with England to form Great Britain by the 1707 Treaty of Union, which was signed by a political elite with no democratic mandate who were largely bribed into agreement or, as Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns put it, “bought and sold for […]

  Trafalgar Square, London, 8 October 2011, Video by Harry Fear TV At the very moment we are here, the United States, Britain, and France are bombing a city in Libya called Sirte.  There are 100,000 people.  Day and night, residential buildings, clinics, schools have been hit with fragmentation bombs and Hellfire missiles. . . […]

  Roshan Muhammed Salih: Angered by the NATO bombing of Libya, this delegation made up of British academics, lawyers, and journalists set off from London’s Heathrow Airport on a peace mission to Tripoli.  Their intention is to emphasize that the Western intervention isn’t altruistic and has made the situation there worse. Dave Roberts: It’s really […]

  David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688-1789.  xii + 210 pp.  Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.  Tables, figures, notes, appendix, bibliography, and index.  $60.00 U.S. (cl).  ISBN 0-521-80967-3. In 1989, Douglass North and Barry Weingast published an article in the Journal of […]

  Great Britain has known about the Malvinas’ hydrocarbon wealth for decades.  The reserves may be worth half a billion dollars. Great Britain’s interest in the Malvinas’ oil dates back to at least 35 years ago.  In 1975, the Crown initiated surveys.  Two exploratory missions between 1998 and 2009 eventually demonstrated its potential. The inclusion […]

  North versus South Cf. SOURCE: Financial Times, 18 October 2009 Laz (Humberto Lázaro Miranda Ramírez) is a Cuban cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published by Juventud Rebelde. | | Print  

  Some religious communities are not reciprocating the tolerance and respect they insist on from others when it comes to gay rights, particularly in Muslim and some Christian communities.  That seemed to be the bleak message at the heart of To Be Straight with You, which was performed at the O’Reilly Theatre in Dublin last […]

  In their article “Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘War on Terror’” (2008), Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem critique white gay discourses in Germany and Britain that trade in Islamophobic constructions of a gay-friendly, sexually liberated ‘West’ and a homophobic, sexually oppressive ‘Islam’ as the West’s Other.  They argue that […]