As the political year ends, it’s worthwhile to reflect on the utter incompetence of Boris Johnson. I’m undecided over whether an incompetent government is worse than one that functions well. It’s probably best to judge them on what they do. The issue with Johnson is that his incompetence has cost thousands of lives. We could
Monday has been dubbed ‘Freedom Day’ by the Prime Minister. Despite being urged to focus his pandemic response on data rather than dates, he set the 19th of July as the date by which the UK would remove most Covid restrictions – regardless of what the virus does. People are being instructed that they must
Last week could have been a pivotal moment in British politics. It should have been. It could still turn out to be hugely important but where were the British public? It’s not entirely clear. After an astounding week in British politics, they seemed to shrug and turn away. Maybe the Dominic Cummings testimony to the
The UK political system is a history of scandal after scandal. If we look to just the recent past, we could mention the way Covid has been handled, the Grenfell disaster, MPs expenses, the Panama Papers, Windrush, Hutton, cash for honours, cash for questions, back to basics, Hillsborough, Orgreave, spycops… There’s a seemingly never ending
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.
Last Monday 18th Oct, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)’s cleaning team won a rota dispute with university management after threatening to take strike action.
The state’s response to the murder of one of their own has been telling.
Cleaners at London Elizabeth Hotel have won back £4,733 furlough wages they were denied by outsourced cleaning company Pridegreen after protesting on 2 October.
In October 2020 the Zapatistas announced they would be visiting the five continents on a voyage of inverted discovery.
Freedom’s long-running US correspondent Louis Further does his monthly roundup of some of the lesser-known stories that have emerged over the last few weeks.
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