Last year, I wrote in this blog that the UK government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis was one of ‘callous incompetence’.[1] In hindsight, that was no surprise: their incompetence stemmed from the deliberate underfunding and privatisation of public health services; their callousness was baked-in to the structurally violent principles of Tory ‘austerity’. That analysis

In a liberal democracy, it’s hard to imagine a more dangerous prospect than neoliberals running a country during a global pandemic. Over the course of the last year, my belief that the answer to major local, regional, national and international problems is anarchism, has been bolstered. Cooperation, mutual aid, and a sense of community have

This text first appeared in the newly released Class War magazine. You can read it here. A year into the Boris Johnson administration and his incompetence is obvious. “Wouldn’t it be fun if we had the clown stuck on the zipwire as Prime Minister?” No, it wouldn’t. Typically, the Tories chose their leader because they

Between the first two spikes of the Covid 19 pandemic, Boris Johnson’s true colours have started to appear. This has not been a surprising process for anarchists. While some mainstream voices have suggested that his government has acted in odd ways as a response to the pandemic, it is clear that he and his government

Boris Johnson’s agenda of forcing workers to return to unsafe workplaces, urged in speeches characterised by his usual clowning incoherency, has been more thoughtfully if sinisterly promoted by a document published on Wednesday by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). The NIESR is funded by government departments and agencies, the research councils,

“That’s just your perception” is a phrase I heard a lot as a trade union activist.

Being ideologically opposed to government, or the very least top-down imposed upon us government, we can sometimes just criticise government action on that ideological line. It shouldn’t exist so what it does is wrong. The pandemic though is helping us see things in a different light. It was anarchists who led the way in terms

We’ve finally gotten to the end of a road which has been decades in the making, in which politicians have slowly realised something that the direct action left has known for a very long time — noise is not a threat. There’s been a conceit in Western politics going back generations that if a politician

When I started this column in 2016 the initial idea was to write a traditional politics column but from an anarchist perspective. I wanted to write an anarchist account of how British politics was developing to keep it charted in a way that hadn’t really been attempted before. I thought at the time that we’d

The prime minister is writing a letter to every household in the UK to a cost of £6m, at a time when the National Health Service (NHS) is suffering under the strains of Covid19 cases. Jon Bigger analyses the letter. Johnson: I am writing to you to update you on the steps we are taking