Yesterday Domenico (Mimmo) Lucano, the former mayor of the town of Riace in Calabria, Italy, was sentenced to a jail term of 13 years 2 months. He was also ordered to repay 500,000 euros to the Italian state and EU. Mimmo Lucano has been perhaps the world’s most admired contemporary pioneer in the creation of […]
Hope and fear are both powerful forces, in politics as in life. Often, they are two sides of a same reality. We hope for life and health, and fear illness and death. We hope for peace and security, we fear war and disaster. We hope for plenty, we fear poverty. People selling a product or […]
According to the science of Red Wall pollsters and focus groupers, Labour can only get permission to be heard again by voters in the North if it first proves it has spent a long time hearing the people’s anger against Labour and internalising the great gospel of Daily Mail headlines which native Northern humankind is […]
The existing Pro-European campaigning organisations are the available components of what should be a national, bipartisan civil society movement for UK re-entry to the EU. A collegiate and diverse movement with vigour and public presence may be more effective than a monolithic entity with homogenised messages and narrative.
The Union would not, in my view, insist in its criteria for UK re-entry on setting the bar of virtue impossibly high. It would make a pragmatic judgement weighing the benefits and risks of UK membership in a range of domains from military and scientific capacity to cultural creativity, governance and accountability.
We are not in a culture war. What we are in is an unsought political struggle with a power-nexus which uses culture-war behaviours and tropes as weapons – and in that process weaponises people.
The tale is that stories, or scares, about possible attempts to extend the Transition have been coming out of the ruling Vote Leave faction in the centre of government. This faction, or some of its members, have been having an internal soap opera/meltdown moment and (ostensibly) losing some key personnel to the grey area of ‘working from home/gardening leave’.
A common theory is that the disaster of Covid-19 suits the UK Brexit regime’s interest by distracting from and/or explaining away the disaster of hard Brexit – a kind of a gigantic diversionary narrative or ‘dead cat’ tactic. This could, incidentally, imply that the regime has no particular interest in managing the pandemic, as long as it can avoid or divert blame for its failure.
If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.
On military philosophers and mercenaries Two striking discussions of Dominic Cummings have described him as a ‘mercenary’. The Newcastle social scientist and child poverty expert, the late John Veit-Wilson, commented in the Guardian that “it has long seemed obvious that Cummings was a highly articulate chancer and mercenary for neo-liberal US billionaires.” A reviewer of […]
On independence, Russian style The House of Commons Select Committee on the Future Relationship with Europe conducted its last oral session before the summer recess interviewing experts on the future of UK foreign and security policies after Brexit, and the scope for future coordination in these areas with the EU. Professor Malcolm Chalmers, from the […]
The first in a 3 part series investigating and analysing the relationships between Brexit and Russia and the part played by Dominic Cummings. Part 1 considers ‘Central Asia’, science, ‘weirdos and misfits’
Failure for the UK to get access to the EU crime databases would probably move from a current average of six days to get criminal convictions to 60 days.