The strange death of social democracy in Western Europe

December 19, 2019

A wider context to Labour’s defeat, the map below shows the weighted share of the vote for Western European social democratic parties since 1950. Looks like the dramatic decline of the share of votes for social democratic parties started with the financial crisis of 2008. The generalised decline of European social democratic parties seems to […]

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What just happened? Part One: There is no working class anymore

December 16, 2019

In the light of its historic defeat last week it’s worth asking “what is the Labour Party for?” The answer is not obvious. Historically the Labour Party has been the party of the working class, the clue is after all in the name. Labour was there to defend the interests of the working class against […]

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What just happened? Part Two: The persistent illusion of class conflict as the primary driver of politics

December 16, 2019

  The slogan ‘For the Many not the Few” looked for a while as if it was a winning popular campaigning position. But in the end its resonance has been shallow and Labour positioning of itself as fighting for the masses against the rich and powerful has turned out to be a losing position. In […]

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From 1997 to 2019

December 15, 2019

These maps show the staggering change in the pattern of voting by constituency between 1997 and 2019. Election Result 1997   Election Result 2019

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A few thoughts about Boris, Brexit and the New Tory Party

September 4, 2019

Prior to the referendum the tectonic plates of British politics had been shifting for a long time. Similar changes also occurred in the other developed capitalist economies. These tectonic shifts are now causing political earthquakes (Trump, Brexit, AFD, the League) and are now fragmenting not just the previously existing system of political parties but rendering […]

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Italy is the eurozone’s weak link

April 24, 2019

Italy is the weak link in the eurozone system. The continuing stagnation of the eurozone economy means that the position of Italy in the eurozone system continues to weaken. Italy’s public debt pile of €2.14 trillion is the largest in Europe in absolute terms as well as the second largest in relative terms after Greeceʼs […]

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A Plea for Some Healthy Scepticism

April 8, 2019

Almost fifty years ago in my late teens I discovered that the world was doomed and that an awful apocalypse was just around the corner. I learned this by reading books like ‘The Population Bomb’ by Professor Paul Ehrlich which predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, and ‘The Doomsday Book’ […]

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Who has the UK been negotiating with?

November 18, 2018

Who has the UK been negotiating with? The Brexit ‘negotiating’ process since Article 50 was triggered has been described and analysed as a negotiation between the UK and something called the EU, but what is this EU? The EU does not have a political centre, or an explicitly hegemonic member state, it is not an […]

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A few thoughts about the Brexit negotiations

November 13, 2018

I voted remain. I didn’t do that because I think the current European project – the European Union – is a good project for Europe. I don’t think it is. I think that the EU project took a wrong turn at Maastricht, that the single currency as it was implemented has been a disaster for […]

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Varoufakis’s proposal for an International New Deal

September 23, 2018

On the 14th September2018 Yanis Varoufakis´s delivered the keynote address at the OECD offering an analysis of the roots of the 2008 financial crisis and some proposals for a new International New Deal. I think his analysis is broadly correct but weak in parts, and the proposals for what might constitute an International New Deal […]

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Can radical social democracy save us?

February 17, 2018

An interesting discussion between Paul Mason, Dr Faiza Shaheen, Anthony Barnett, Dr Johnna Montgomerie and Laurie Macfarlane about whether radical social democracy offers a way out of the crisis of neoliberalism, and what this means for economic policy over the next decade. The debate is part of a new series by Paul Mason exploring what […]

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Labour and the new terrain of politics

February 13, 2018

  The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear Antonio Gramsci Politics is going through an odd phase. Things seem to be changing in some profound ways and yet the old institutional configurations seem to […]

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Trump, Russia and missing the point

January 22, 2018

  These two articles are very interesting and both are basically arguing the same thing – which is that the obsession, by the Democratic Party and a lot of US left/liberal commentators, with Russian meddling in the election of Trump is a massive distraction. Trump got elected for reasons and one of the big reasons […]

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Leaked plans for an EU austerity machine

December 14, 2017

The French president Emmanuel Macron has been pushing the case for ambitious reforms of the eurozone, and the EU, proposing a separate EU budget (shifting spending from member state national budgets upwards to an integrated EU budget), an EU finance ministry and a European monetary fund for the eurozone (to act as permanent mechanism to […]

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Yanis Varoufakis – Debtors’ Prison, John Maynard Keynes & the Double Standards of the EU

December 7, 2017

In this video founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 and former finance minister of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, talks about the concept of “Debtors’ Prison” and the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes. Worth watching for the explanation of Keynes extremely interesting, and still highly relevant, ideas about how to create a more stable […]

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Greek pensions and the question of social democracy in the EU

December 6, 2017

  While the tedious and absurd Brexit drama unfolds, at the other end of Europe, the people of Greece continue to endure the relentless grind of European Union ‘solidarity’ as the Troika (the EU, the European Central Bank, and the IMF) continue to enforce a program of yet more spending cuts. The next batch of […]

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Yanis Varoufakis on Brexit Negotiations, Ireland, Greece

November 29, 2017

Click the video to make it play – you may get an advert first.

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The post-Brexit Irish border – a brief summary

November 25, 2017

Both the Irish and UK governments say that they don’t want a closed border in Ireland and both would like the post Brexit border to be as open as it is now. There is more at stake than just the border in the north. The UK is by far Ireland’s largest trade partner (see the […]

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Fake news for a good cause is still a bad thing

October 1, 2017

Sometimes one is overwhelmed by the sheer tedium of ubiquitous irrationality, especially if you read about anything to do with the environment or climate change in the liberal press. The capture of the important pillars of liberal opinion – such as the Guardian and the Observer newspapers – by green ideologues means that one is […]

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One diagram that explains the 2017 UK election result

September 16, 2017

  These three graphs make a convincing statement about how the Brexit vote changed UK politcs. Comparing the two election results it is clear that the breakdown of the 2017 results by age was an almost exact clone of a similar breakdown of the referendum result. Basically younger voters voted Remain and switched to Labour, […]

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