Social Justice

The Queen just announced that private companies can lock people up, and nobody noticed

The government has announced the “biggest shake-up of prisons since Victorian times”. But while the media focuses on ‘iPads for prisoners‘ and ‘weekend inmates‘, the real story is in the handing of new financial powers to prison governors, allowing them “unprecedented levels of control over all aspects of prison management”. The government is using the academies model to privatise our prisons through […]

UK media and the legitimisation of austerity policies

By featuring some perspectives whilst excluding others, UK media has played a crucial role in the legitimisation of austerity policies.

The media cannot tell people what to think in a simple manner. However by featuring some perspectives whilst excluding others it plays a crucial role in the legitimisation of policy and the exercise of power.

“Print the Money”: Trump’s “Reckless” Proposal Echoes Franklin and Lincoln

“Print the money” has been called crazy talk, but it may be the only sane solution to a $19 trillion federal debt that has doubled in the last 10 years. The solution of Abraham Lincoln and the American colonists can still work today. “Reckless,” “alarming,” “disastrous,” “swashbuckling,” “playing with fire,” “crazy talk,” “lost in a forest of nonsense”: these are […]

Refugees from ‘Endless’ War

“If you don’t like refugees coming to your country, stop voting for politicians who love to bomb the shit out of them.”

Policymakers in Official Washington talk piously about waging “humanitarian” wars, but the real-life consequences of these interventions play out in squalid refugee camps far from U.S. shores, as Ann Wright witnessed.

The Sykes-Picot Legacy, 100 Years On

One hundred years ago this week, a secret deal was concluded between Britain and France that plunged the Middle East into a century of bloodshed. Two colonial negotiators, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, agreed to carve up the Middle East between their respective countries in order to secure European control of the failing Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.

Victory! Construction Giants Pay For Blacklisting

BLACKLISTING companies were shamed into paying out millions on May 9th to the workers whose lives they ruined in a historic victory for trade unionists. Eight major construction firms concluded a lengthy court battle with an 11th-hour increase in compensation. The total sum paid out by Balfour Beatty, Carillion, Costain, Kier, Laing O’Rourke, Sir Robert McAlpine, Skanska UK and Vinci […]

The ‘Aleppo Hospital’ Smokescreen

If you believed the western corporate media you might think that the Syrian Government, for some unknown reason, has been bombing its own hospitals, and had killed Aleppo’s only paediatric surgeon. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Norman Finkelstein on David Cameron’s Dodgy ‘Friends’

If Corbyn shouldn’t have referred to Hezbollah as his ‘friend’; and if one attaches equal value to each human life; and if war crimes are war crimes regardless of the address from which they originate—in other words, if facts rather than demagoguery serve as the basis of one’s moral calculus, wasn’t the Tory embrace of Israel incalculably worse?

The true anti-semites, past and present

We are desperately in need of some sanity as the British political and media establishment seek to generate yet another “new anti-semitism” crisis, on this occasion to undermine a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party before the upcoming local elections. Corbyn and his supporters want to revive Labour as a party of social justice, while Britain’s elites hope that – in a period […]