Tag Archives: UK politics

Last night in Britain (October 29, 2018), the British Chancellor released the – Budget 2018 – aka the 2018 fiscal statement (my terminology, to avoid triggering the flawed household budget analogy). The detailed analysis is being done by others and I haven’t had enough time to read all the documents produced by the Government and others yet anyway. But of the hundreds of pages of data and documentation I have been able to consult, the Government is trying to win back votes while not...

This week’s theme seems to be the about how the so-called progressive side of the economic and political debate keeps kicking ‘own goals’ (given a lot of this is happening in Britain where they play soccer) or finding creative ways to ‘face plant’ (moving to Europe where there is more snow). Over the other side of the Atlantic, as America approaches its mid-term elections, so-called progressive forces who give solace to the New Democrats, aka Neoliberal Democrats are railing against fiscal...

Owen Jones, Paul Mason & the problem with the UK left  Owen Jones and Paul Mason are widely considered to be the UK’s pre-eminent left-wing commentators; both appear frequently on television and radio, write regularly for mainstream publications like The Guardian and The New Statesman, have had books published (and subsequently translated into multiple languages) and attract enormous followings on social media: as of August 2018, their Twitter accounts have 742,000 and 597,000...

Forget the Deep State. There's talk of a military coup in the case of  a leftist leader being elected. No, we are not talking about Venezuela. Rather Britain.This is not a joke either. It's actually being floated seriously. This is the way that the unthinkable gets normalized. It's a tactic. Written by Paul Carter for the de facto house organ of the Conservative Party, the article makes clear that discussions on such a course of action in the event of a Labour victory under Corbyn are...

Once Britain lost its empire, it managed to secure a degree of global influence by throwing in its lot with the US as a junior partner in Washington’s quest for global hegemony. And if the 21st century tells us anything so far, it is that the centuries’ old colonialist mentality of the British state has not gone away: the mindset of Empire, conquest and duplicity persists.… British elite trying to remain relevant on the world stage and in the great game.Colin Todhunter delivers a blistering...

As I explainedearlier this week, under the Royal Prerogative, the Prime Minister can approve any military action without a prior parliamentary vote or debate (as David Cameron did in Libya in 2011). On matters of war, Britain’s parliament is one of the weakest in the democratic world. But May’s decision is immensely politically contentious. Labour, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats and some Tory MPs are furious that she failed to consult parliament. Only 22 per cent of the British public,...

The site is just back up at 16.42 on 21 March having managed to slip like the Tardia into another dimension and thus dodge the massive DOS attack we are under. over 50,000 separate IP addresses simultaneously throwing up millions of hits. The attack has not actually stopped and does seem to have a human intelligence changing terms and directing it, which could make for an interesting afternoon. Once our excellent techs get a minute from fighting it, we will post the cloudfare graphs as...

There are times when so-called progressives outdo themselves with their (usually self-styled) ‘genius solutions’ to the ravages of neoliberalism. They come up with elaborate ‘solutions’ that people on the Left get feverishly excited about yet fail to see how obviously ridiculous these strategies are when all the options are allowed. They, in fact, step further into the mirky neoliberal world by trying to be progressive because they fail to see what the basic issue is. One recent example of...

UK Russiagate. More insanity. Paul Robinson takes it apart.IrrussianalityThe hunters become the huntedPaul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

In a full about turn, Gordon Brown, has now decided that Jeremy Corbyn is a the right person to lead the UK out of it’s troubled times.... Brown, whose leadership of the country was fraught with setbacks, said that Corbyn’s war on rising inequality and stagnant wages was “absolutely right.” The London Economic Ex-PM Gordon Brown has backed…Jeremy CorbynJoe Mellor