The junior doctor contract is supposed to be “cost neutral” but for someone who works part time, it means I will likely never see my salary improve. It means I could not have afforded to have either of my children. It means the female doctors who look up to me so much, will have to choose children or their careers.
Under Tory leadership the UK has gained the unenviable prize of being the first nation to ever be investigated by the UN for “grave violations” of the human rights of disabled people.
Jeremy Corbyn shares his take on what has been an eventful week, from the Government’s change of heart on the Saudi prison contract to the celebration of Black History Month in Bristol.
The global economy faces so many headwinds at present that it’s hard to know where to begin. China’s real estate bubble has popped, capital flight has put emerging markets into a nosedive, commodities prices have plunged triggering fears of deflation, the economic data is increasingly bleak, and the Fed’s plan to “normalize” rates has sent stocks gyrating like never before.
According to a study by Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE), 33% of all UK households endure below-par living standards – defined as going without three or more “basic necessities of life”, such as being able to adequately feed and clothe themselves and their children, and to heat and insure their homes. In the early 1980s, the comparable figure was 14%. A 140% increase.
The media do not merely generate the political weather. They play a large part in creating the climate in which information is received and understood. A notion such as ‘electability’, to take the example at hand, is unthinkable without the media, which, in their every representation of a political leader, ask (and supply the authorities to help us decide) not only who is and is not electable, but what should be the criteria by which electability is judged.
“The actions of the DWP are counter to transparent government and freedom of the press, upon which a functioning democracy rely. We consider the actions of the DWP to be highly offensive and discriminatory.”
“Neither national nor European worker protection laws apply to the ECB, because it is not part of any nation. Nor is it a European state,” said an ECB staffer.
Predictions are that we will soon be seeing the “nuclear option” — central bank-created money injected directly into the real economy. All other options having failed, governments will be reduced to issuing money outright to cover budget deficits.
Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and the potential for ordinary people to make radical change.
While the Guardian and Observer market themselves as caring about justice and equality, but do nothing to bring them about apart from promoting tinkering with the present, hugely unjust, global neoliberal order, Corbyn’s rhetoric suggests that the apple cart needs upending.
Jeremy Corbyn will have to face this monster, not only in the House of Commons but also in the mass media and the Internet. He will have to face the decades of Anglo-American political and economic incest, not that only manifested in the past century’s wedding of US plutocracy with British aristocracy.
