In the last month we’ve all heard about David Cameron’s proposed crackdown on benefit frauds. Lots has been said around the left about how these proposals are completely missing the mark in terms of where the government can be saving money if need be, but there hasn’t been much of a defense of the benefit [...]
In a week’s time, about 1000 people from across the country are going to set up a protest camp in or near Edinburgh. Targetting the Royal Bank of Scotland, it’ll probably be the first big protest against a major bank that the UK has seen in this crisis.
In 2008, RBS wasn’t just the biggest [...]
Some friends of mine have told me to watch the Channel 4 Dispatches show on the banks, aired last week, but still available online. It took me a while to get through – I kept falling asleep in the long segments of zooming in and out of buildings, the dark filter shots over the London [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman
One month ago I argued that there were certain instances where charity giving was both a way of disavowing the feeling of guilt, and that it operated like a business, trying to drive out other competition.
I argued that though this was the case, it is surely better to have charity for [...]
I was thinking this week about the working day, and about how it has been transformed in recent decades. I’m sure that there is plenty of sociological work on this of which I am not aware, but thought I would sketch a few thoughts about developments since the time of Marx, if only to start [...]
Mandelson made me chuckle today. A couple of hours after shareholders approved Kraft’stakeover of Cadbury’s he met with Kraft’s CEO. Speaking to the BBC about the meeting he expressed his “dissapointment” that Kraft had failed to give him specific commitments about keeping jobs in Britain, and told of his determination to get firmer, more specific [...]
The key headlines of the past few weeks have focused on pre-election measures and proposals aimed at trying to square the multitudinous circles of simultaneously getting the UK’s spiralling debt under control, creating a more equitable system, not cutting key public services, and reforming the financial system in a meaningful way in the midst of [...]
‘Tis the season for rampant consumerism, and given that I live within spitting distance of the new Westfield shopping centre in London – a place where people actually put on their ‘Sunday Best’ to worship at the temple of ‘fashion’ – I have more than my fair 12 days share of festive reminders. I’m not [...]
When discussing economic inequality, we on the left need to be very clear about precisely what it is we’re objecting to. As I’ve said before, I have a vague plan at some point of writing an extended post about this, and one of these days I might get round to actually writing the damn thing. [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman
In my opinion, that famous neo-Hegelian thinker Francis Fukuyama – the man responsible for the predication in the late eighties/early nineties that at the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end-of-history had loomed upon us, and it had shown free-market capitalism to be the victor over socialism – has gone from [...]
