18 February 2014 — OurKingdom
The neo-liberal project has purged democracy from almost every corner of our lives. In doing so, it has changed our understanding of the world, and so who we are. A council tax referendum in Brighton would be a signal that England’s democratic soul is still alive.
8 November 2013 — Liberty
Yesterday, for the first time, Britain’s three senior spy chiefs, the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, came before a public parliamentary committee. It was a unique opportunity shed some light onto the recent dubious goings-on in the British secret service.
21 October 2013
Central to us on the left is the dilemma of a seemingly indifferent working class to the changes that impact directly not only on our material well-being but on the corporatisation of our cultural lives. Some argue that it’s down to the prevailing sense of powerlessness as the gulf between those who govern and the governed, deepens and widens. But there is perhaps another explanation for our disenfranchisement; the role of the ‘middle class’ as a mechanism of social control.
17 October 2013 — Dissident Voice
10 September 2013 — — Strategic Culture Foundation
Launching a war in slow motion against a faraway country is never a smart thing to do, but it can have its advantages, too, in case the need arises to rein in the war on reflection before it gets under way. That seems to be happening in the case of the United States’ planned strike on Syria.
3 September 2013 — WSWS
Recent disclosures have again confirmed London Underground management is planning to close all its 268 ticket offices over the next two years. Around 2,000 jobs are expected to be lost during that period, with job losses across the rail and underground network rising to 6,000 by 2020. The job losses are part of Transport for London (TfL) and London Conservative mayor Boris Johnson’s £7.6 billion cuts programme to the London transport budget.
22 July 2013 — Open Security
The marketisation of access to housing security is central to the increasingly normative experience of housing precarity in London. Lambeth Council’s eviction of long-term squatted and short-life housing co-op communities is pouring fuel onto the fire: making people homeless to clear the way for public housing stock sell-offs.
26 August 2013 — National Security Archive – Unredacted
Sixty years ago this Monday, on August 19, 1953, modern Iranian history took a critical turn when a U.S.- and British-backed coup overthrew the country’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The event’s reverberations have haunted its orchestrators over the years, contributing to the anti-Americanism that accompanied the Shah’s ouster in early 1979, and even influencing the Iranians who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran later that year. Continue reading
23 August 2013 — Global Network
Our latest edition of our Global Network newsletter, Space Alert, is now finished and is at the printers. There is extensive reporting in this issue about anti-drone campaigning all over the world. Continue reading
21 August 2013 — Global Research
‘Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.’ — Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
At long last Britain is discussing and objecting to fracking – or we would be if the general public had access to accurate information. As it is, Prime Minister David Cameron is going all out to promote a country-wide embrace of shale gas.
19 August 2013 — New Left Project
The post-colonial philosopher Gayatri Spivak once famously asked: ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ Colonialism though is not just about race, it is also about that great unmentionable, class. And class colonization is one of the most central features of British social and political life. Continue reading
16 August 2013 — Our Kingdom – Occupied Times
14 August 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
An outstanding historical account of the “Green Bans” first introduced by the communist-led New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in the 1970s in response to community demand to preserve inner-city parkland and historic buildings. One of the first women to be accepted as a builders labourer, filmmaker Pat Fiske in 1985 traced the development of a union whose social and political activities challenged the notion of what a union should be. Continue reading
13 August 2013 — Center for Constitutional Rights
[It’s great to know, that every once in awhile, we, that is, we the People, achieve a significant victory over the forces of repression and reaction. And CCR’s legal battle to overturn ‘stop and frisk’ in NYC reminds me that back in 1980, the equivalent law here in the UK was called the “Suss Law” and its use against people of colour by the Met police eventually triggered riots that saw cities burn. The Suss Law was eventually repealed only to be re-instated (conveniently) by the phony ‘war on terror’ and used to stop hundreds of thousands of people, with virtually no ‘terror’ arrests. WB]
11 August 2013 — Corpwatch
The idyllic village of Balcombe, just south of London, is a stronghold of the Conservative party. Just the sort of place that one might imagine cheering on industry plans to drill for natural gas and applaud the tax breaks that the government has offered to industry.
But 82 percent of the village voted firmly against plans by Cuadrilla Resources, headed by Lord John Browne, the former CEO of British Petroleum, to conduct hydraulic fracturing in their community. Over two dozen protestors have been arrested in the last few days for attempting to block company equipment – including Natalie Hynde and Simon Medhurst, a couple who glued themselves together this morning.
10 August 2013 — Strategic Culture Foundation
At the end of July, eurozone deputy finance ministers approved another transfer of money to Greece to the tune of EUR 6.8 billion (it had previously been thought that Athens would be allocated EUR 8.1 billion). Several days earlier, meanwhile, the Greek parliament approved the latest in a series of legislative acts, the adoption of which had been a condition of receiving money from international creditors – the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank. Continue reading
8 August 2013 — Our NHS
The NHS is paying millions to a failed private Treatment Centre to escape a contract after a series of patient deaths – and the figures don’t quite add up.
8 August 2013 — WSWS
The biggest ever contract for the sell-off of public health services in England, worth between £700 million to £1.1 billion, is being offered to private health care providers by the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) as part of its “Older People’s Programme”. From July 2014, six National Health Service (NHS) contracts that include four hospital trusts, one mental health trust and one community service trust will be replaced.
1 August 2013 — Open Democracy
Today Health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s plans to cut services and close departments at Lewisham Hospital were defeated in the High Court after a fiercely fought grassroots campaign. Continue reading
31 July 2013 — The Electronic Intifada
Critics of a new Israeli army recruitment campaign say it’s designed to fragment the Palestinian community and make it more difficult to obtain their rights.
The New Dark Age 