Geography Archives: Britain

BRITAIN faces a number of serious and interlinked threats to the public’s health and future wellbeing. Tinkering around the edges, gradual reform or triangulation-style politics are simply no longer commensurate with the challenges bearing down on us. Radical action, implemented right now, is the only realistic option.

November 2017 marked the centenary of two of the most decisive events in the twentieth century: the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia and the Balfour Declaration in Britain.… At loggerheads were two mutually exclusive political objectives: the one to promote worldwide, anti-imperialist revolution; the other, to further British imperial interests in the Middle East.

It is time for George Monbiot’s legion of supporters to call him out. Not only is he a hypocrite, but he is becoming an increasingly dangerous one.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will stop research on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and is expected to lay-off 300 research and development staff in Massachusetts and Connecticut, in a move that could severely hamper progress towards effective treatments for these illnesses – proving that critical medical research cannot be left in the hands of capitalist profiteers.

Liz Payne reviews The Woman Worker by Nadezhda K Krupskaya.

The Labour leader sets out a vision for a more just international order and a new and independent foreign policy for Britain when he becomes Prime Minister.

As of July 2017, the Bank of England measured the stock of private debt held by individuals at £1.548 trillion; making household sector indebtedness one of the biggest problems facing the United Kingdom’s economy and society. There is growing public policy concern over the historically unprecedented level of household debt but little by way of proposed solutions to deal with it.

Brexit sold the country a dream; ostensibly a project built on anti-migrant sentiment, it also invoked delusions of grandeur, rooted in reanimating the glorious days of imperial rule and global British hegemony. Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit speech announced a vision for a ‘Global Britain’ – ‘a great, global trading nation that is respected around the world and strong.’

I became interested in literary relationships with communism and anti-fascism when I was an undergraduate student. I was curious about how modernist writing, often thought to have peaked by the mid-1920s, was transformed by the rise of fascism and the coming of the Second World War.

It has often been claimed that the radical documentary practice of the 1970s attended to class politics to the exclusion of gender. This was one of the core arguments for a staged practice of photography.

Winning the next election is the start of the fight for Corbynism from below. A left wing government will face attempts to bring it in line through bribery, obstruction and, if those options fail, force. The establishment and the capitalist class will do anything to stop a socialist program from going the distance.

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.