Geography Archives: Britain

This article assesses the two recent historic events in Britain: the exit of Britain from the imperialist bloc known as the European Union (EU); and the crushing electoral defeat of the Labour Party. Neither Brexit, nor Labour’s defeat, can be understood in isolation from the other.

We lost. In Part I the archaeology of our defeat was made clear: Remain killed us. But to fully realise how this happened we need to look at the deeper political substrate on which the rot of left Remainism has grown: the ongoing collapse of the political centre, writes GEORGE WEST

In Part I ALEX BIRCH charts our defeat and how we could have won. See Part II for an examination of the politics that engineered our failure, and how to fight them.

Conservative leader Boris Johnson swept to power in the UK’s December 12 elections, winning 365 of a possible 650 seats. Labour’s socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn announced his resignation, after a bitterly disappointing night for his party.

Labour’s massive loss to the Tories has bummed out a lot of people. Everyone’s discussing it and arguing about what went wrong and who’s to blame. I don’t have any special insight into UK politics, but one thing that really shocked me about the election is the way that Jewish identity and fabricated charges of antisemitism were weaponized in a smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the mild leftwing shift of his Labour Party.

GAWAIN LITTLE looks in detail at the different aspects of Labour’s election defeat.

The vilification of the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, as an antisemite has intensified in the run up to the December 12 election in Britain. What makes this especially troubling, not to say bizarre, is that since he first became a member of parliament in 1983 Corbyn has been the most consistent campaigner against all forms of racism.

Almost immediately after Le Mesurier’s alleged plunge to his death, reports began to emerge of tampering and the removal of details about the controversial “private security” operative’s career.

Corbyn’s position on Britain’s military adventures has been right on every occasion, argues Chris Nineham.

Extinction Rebellion must recognise the impacts of colonialism and capitalism, and demand a just transition for all, argues Aranyo Aarjan

One of Marx’s brightest concepts, perhaps his profoundest dialectical construct in Capital, is the “fetishism of commodities.” It emphasizes something very important about the foggy world of appearances and how can forget what lies within, behind what is immediately apparent. We can read it as a parable in which Marx tries to bring to life (and light) the “secret” of the ostensibly trivial commodity, the genie that exists within the magic bottle.

There are some very obvious facts in British politics which nobody seems to be saying.

Kevin Blowe is the coordinator of the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) from 2014 when it began focusing on the policing of opposition to fracking across the country. He regularly contributes to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s work on protecting rights to freedom of assembly and spent 25 years as a campaigner with the Newham Monitoring Project in East London.

A new film depicting the whistleblower Katherine Gun, who tried to stop the Iraq invasion, is largely accurate, but the story is not over, says Sam Husseini.

The latest report about kidnappings, rendition, ‘black sites’ and torture is a remarkable piece of investigative work. It provides us with nothing less than a litany of shocking evidence and testimony and at 403 pages it makes for truly grim reading. This article is made up of a very brief set of extracts from the just-released  CIA Torture Unredacted report.

Hubris is usually a forewarning of impending calamity. Extreme arrogance blinds the hubristic person to the limits of their power. So, blindly, they push on with reckless excess, leading to potentially disastrous results.

The British Navy’s seizing of an Iranian oil tanker shows Britain following Trump, trading in diplomacy for the threat of military confrontation, argues Lindsey German

Britain’s leading newspaper The Guardian, which has relentlessly attacked Jeremy Corbyn and his leftist allies, published but then quickly removed an open letter signed by Noam Chomsky defending Labour MP Chris Williamson from “anti-Semitism” smears.

We are frequently told that capitalism equals ‘freedom’; that it is the organic product of ‘human nature’. But far from arising naturally, the birth of the ‘free’ market is built on violence, dispossession, and enslavement.

Blackthorn Safaris, based in Oswestry, hosts ‘canned’ hunts on an estate 40 miles north of the mining town of Kimberly, in South Africa’s Northern Cape district.