1 July 2021 — Good Law Project
On Monday we published a short post, pointing out that the so-called “transparency” data – which is supposed to list all of the external meetings Ministers have – failed to mention a meeting on 1 April 2020 that Lord Bethell had with Abingdon shortly before his department awarded it the first of two contracts worth up to £87.5m in total.
1 July 2021 — Institute of Race Relations
As we go to press, polls are open in Batley and Spen, where the scars left by the far-right murder of Jo Cox in the days leading up to the Brexit vote are far from healing. In a special section of our regular calendar on racism and resistance, we document evidence of communalism, bigotry and ‘dog-whistle racism’ in what must surely go down as one of the most toxic by-election campaigns in recent history. Regrettably, the sowing of division and blatant disrespect for community cohesion (remember how the government pushed that) is not confined to the campaign trail.
1 July 2021 — Big Brother Watch
Big Brother Watch Team
“Knowledge is power”, or so the old adage goes. Perhaps what the proverb overlooks is that those who facilitate the spread of knowledge hold more power than anyone. In human rights terms, freedom of expression is the right to impart and to receive information; and while a greater emphasis is often placed on the abilities of speakers to express themselves, what makes censorship so potent is that it is, in effect, the ability of an actor to exercise power over others by preventing them from receiving information.
1July 2021 — Tricontinental
Raúl Martínez (Cuba), Yo he visto (‘I Have Seen’), n.d.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
In 1869, at the age of fifteen, José Martí and his young friends published a magazine in Cuba called La Patria Libre (‘The Free Homeland’), which adopted a strong position against Spanish imperialism. The first and only issue of the magazine carried Martí’s poem, ‘Abdala’. The poem is about a young man, Abdala, who goes off to fight against all odds to free his native land, which Martí calls Nubia. ‘Neither laurels nor crowns are needed for those who breathe courage’, Martí wrote. ‘Let us run to the fight … to war, valiant ones’. And in the rousing address by Abdala, comes these lyrical words:
1 July 2021 — Black Agenda Report
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
The British crown and the colonists were both determined to seize lands from native peoples and to continue enslavement.”
Continue reading
1 July 2021 — Indian Punchline
Zhou Enlai (left) and Mao Zedong (second from left) at Chinese Communist capital of Yan’an, c.1936. Photo by Edgar Snow.This is the season to reread Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, the classic work on the birth of the communist movement in China. Alongside John Reid’s Ten Days That Shook the World, the gripping eyewitness account of the Bolshevik Revolution, Snow’s book was compulsive reading in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm as college students.
1 July 2021 — NetPol
Protester at a Black Lives Matter protest in London in 2020. Photo: Shutterstock
An Inquiry report published today by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Democracy and the Constitution has endorsed the demand – by local and national organisations and tens of thousands of members of the public who have supported Netpol’s Charter for Freedom of Assembly Rights – for clear guidelines on the way protests are policing.
1 July 2021 — — Origin: Media Lens
As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a stunning example has highlighted this core property once again.
1 July 2021 — Michael Roberts Blog
It’s 100 years today since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was first formed by just 50 members, mostly intellectuals, but including railway and mine workers. 100 years later to the day, the official membership figure is 95m and there are 4.8m party branches. This is surely the largest political party the world has ever seen. A quarter of the membership is under 35 years; 29% are female, up from 12% in 1949 and over half of members have college degrees (that means half don’t!).
The New Dark Age 