Extinctions
- May 07, 2019
- by
- Matt
For rightwing media commentators steeped in climate change denialism – and let’s face it most of them are -the Extinction Rebellion protests and the involvement of children and young people in the school strikes movement have been an object of scorn and derision.
Some of these esteemed pundits, like Brendan O’Neill from Spooked Online, will tell...
The Caliphate According to Saint Matteo
- May 03, 2019
- by
- Matt
The Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is a busy man. With less than a month until the European Elections, he has been touring the continent to shore up the troops for the new nationalist/populist bloc that he and his cohorts are seeking to establish in the European Parliament
The far-right has tried this before. In 2007...
In Praise of Political Correctness
- May 01, 2019
- by
- Matt
There was a time, in the Thatcher years, when the concept of ‘political correctness’ was used to de-legitimize the left and/or bring feminism and particularly antiracism into ridicule and disrepute.
Bliss was it to be alive in those days, when the British yellow press regaled the nation with mostly invented stories about what ‘loony left’ councils...
We the People
- April 26, 2019
- by
- Matt
There was a time when references to ‘the people’ or the ‘will of the people’ were a rarity in British politics, unless you went on leftist solidarity demos in solidarity with Nicaragua or El Salvador and knew enough Spanish to join in the stirring chant ‘El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido’ (the people, united, will...
We Need to Talk About Spiked
- April 23, 2019
- by
- Matt
There was a time when I thought of Brendan O’Neill and the Spiked Online crowd as a freakish but curious anomaly in the British media.
Occasionally I wondered how a former leftist sect once known for publishing apologetics for war crimes was able to reinvent itself as a pseudo-contrarian thinktank peddling rightwing strawman arguments in order...
The Tony Blair Guide to Fighting Fascism
- April 22, 2019
- by
- Matt
There is no doubt that the resurgence of far-right populist politics across the world poses a direct threat to the rights and safety of migrants and minorities, to the future of democratic coexistence, and to the future of the nation-state as a multicultural and multiethnic space.
Now no less an intellectual authority than Tony Blair has...
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