Ian Sinclair
As the Guardian noted, Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide victory on 12 September in the Labour leadership contest was ‘one of the most stunning electoral upsets of postwar politics.’ Billed at 200-1 by bookmakers when he entered the race in June, the Islington North MP won 59 percent of the vote, giving him ‘the biggest party mandate for any political leader in UK political history’, according to the Guardian’s chief political correspondent.
What makes Corbyn’s victory so…
‘Numbers, measures, and metrics profoundly influence our daily existence’, the editors of this academic volume note. And, with statistics having ‘very real and quite significant political, humanitarian, legal and scholarly consequences’, they are therefore ‘deeply political’.
However, considering the relative importance of numbers, the authors argue many people – and I would count myself as one of them – are ‘relatively innumerate’, and thus susceptible to being misled, or flat…
On 26 June, Seifeddine Rezgui, a 23-year-old student, murdered 38 people at a beach resort in Sousse, Tunisia. 30 of the dead were British nationals. Subsequent news reports have noted Rezgui received training at an Islamic State (IS – also known as ISIS) base in western Libya.
Speaking to the BBC a few days later, David Cameron argued IS…
Indian writer and dissident Arundhati Roy’s work has long embodied John Pilger’s belief that a journalist should be ‘an agent of ordinary people, not of those who seek to control them.’ Scathing and lucid, the slim Capitalism: A Ghost Story, is no exception.
Made up of seven short, accessible essays, Roy deftly skewers the hypocrisy and rapacious nature of India’s elite, highlighting the extreme inequality and poverty, corruption and subjugation that are endemic in ‘The…
Feminism is as relevant today as it’s ever been. Recent research by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the universities of Bristol and Central Lancashire found more than 40 percent of girls between the ages of 13 and 17 in England said that they had been coerced into sex acts, while one in five said that they had suffered physical violence or intimidation from boyfriends.
The survey also found that 39% of teenage boys admitted to regularly viewing…
Last year, it was reported that the ministry of defence (MoD) had tried to stop the publication of this book, written by a British army officer. The MoD argued that it was inappropriate for a serving officer (Martin has since resigned) to publish such a critical work about Britain’s 2006–2014 occupation of Helmand province in Afghanistan.
There is certainly much to embarrass the British military in Martin’s work, a reworking of his PhD thesis. Based on over 150 interviews with…
Coming, as it does, in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent warning that global warming is on course to inflict ‘severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts’ on the planet, this book couldn’t be more timely or important.
To make the necessary reduction in carbon emissions, Klein explains, the world needs to institute immediate, transformational change on the scale of the American New Deal of the 1930s or the national mobilisations during the Second…
CRUDIFICATION, an Iraqi Fine Artists Association in
Britain Group show in London, features the work
of Jalal Alwan (pictured), and others. www.p21.org.uk
Just over ten years since it failed the public so completely over the 2003 Iraq War, the mainstream media’s coverage of the current Iraq crisis has been predictably awful.
“Stop droning on Mr Cameron… SEND IN THE DRONES” was The Sun’s considered…
Everyday Sexism is already an important touchstone in the fourth-wave feminism that many commentators are now heralding.
The book comes out of the website Laura Bates, a young journalist, set up in April 2012 after experiencing a particularly bad week of street harassment. Since then the website and Twitter account has collected tens of thousands of testimonies from girls and women detailing the appalling level of sexism that continues to blight societies around the globe…
Just over ten years since it failed the public so completely over the 2003 Iraq War, the mainstream media’s coverage of the current Iraq crisis has been predictably awful.
“Stop droning on Mr Cameron… SEND IN THE DRONES” was The Sun’s considered front page on 4 September 2014. At the opposite end of the British press spectrum The Independent’s…
‘Napalm was born a hero’, argues Columbia University’s Robert Neer about the creation of the sticky, jellied incendiary by US scientists in the Second World War.
Burning at over 800 ° C, napalm played a decisive role in the Pacific War, with perhaps 100,000 Japanese dying in the infamous napalm attack on Tokyo on 9 March 1945. The US ‘scorched and boiled and baked to death’ more people in that one night than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, according to US air force…
Richard Seymour, founder of the popular Lenin’s Tomb blog and regular contributor to the Guardian, is one of the smartest, sharpest Leftist intellectuals working in the UK today. After writing books critiquing liberal imperialism, David Cameron and Christopher Hitchens, he has now turned his attention to the 2008 financial crisis and the British government’s austerity agenda.
Seymour’s central concern is that the Left has ‘nothing to show’ for itself after four years of a…
When the Coalition Government was defeated in parliament over military intervention in Syria last summer many activists probably thought that was the end of the matter. After all Prime Minister David Cameron had conceded ‘the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that and the Government will act accordingly.’
What many people don’t realise is the UK…
Opening the door to large-scale privatisation, the introduction of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act ‘marked the end of a national health service in England’, according to two contributors to this important and very timely book.
The coalition government’s plan to ‘reform’ the NHS did not appear in the election manifestos of either the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, the coalition agreement itself explicitly stated they would ‘stop the top-down…
Although the corporate world has long claimed the values of self-help, entrepreneurialism and innovation for itself, this book – based on the ideas of the Transition movement, of which Rob Hopkins is the founder and figurehead – proves that progressive activists have as strong a claim on these principles as anyone else.
Encouraging local action to combat global threats, the Transition movement is a grassroots network of communities…
