12 October, 2011 // Category: Education, Politics, Vision/Strategy
Melissa Benn is a journalist, novelist and campaigner. Her most recent book is School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education. In it she analyses the Coalition government’s attempts to revolutionise the British school system through a privatising agenda, the troubled history of education reform...
11 October, 2011 // Category: International, Philosophy and Theory, Politics
Partisanship is a phenomenon, much like political correctness, that appears to be both highly prevalent and nearly universally opposed. Jon Stewart’s 'Rally to Restore Sanity', held last year, marked a highpoint of what one might call ‘liberal anti-partisanship’. It is ‘liberal’ though only in...
04 October, 2011 // Category: Activism, Foreign policy, Politics, Terror/War
One night last summer Shakeel Khan and his family were at home in North Waziristan when there was a huge explosion. ‘I was resting with my parents in one room when it happened. God saved my parents and I, but my brother, his wife, and children were all killed.’ The children were five and three...
30 September, 2011 // Category: Corporate power, Politics
Next month sees the publication of a new report on political party funding by the Committee on Standards in Public Life. In the coalition agreement, the Government promised to ‘remove big money from politics’ by ‘limiting donations and reforming party funding’. The forthcoming CSPL report could...
15 September, 2011 // Category: Culture, History, Politics
First published in 1983, Geoffrey Pearson’s Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears is widely acclaimed as a seminal text in British criminology. The Economist praised it as “a calm and witty history of moral panics that have gripped England over the ages… a brilliant survey”. Pearson is...
14 September, 2011 // Category: Media, Politics
The Leveson inquiry has been launched to investigate phone hacking and the culture, practices and ethics of the press; there is a Lords Select Committee on the future of investigative journalism; a joint Select Committee on privacy and injunctions; all of which will feed into a Communications...
12 September, 2011 // Category: Corporate power, Health, Politics
In voting for the third reading of Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill last week MPs voted to replace the NHS as a public service with a system of competing businesses – foundation trusts, social enterprises and for-profit corporations. The government’s claim that the Bill does not...
04 August, 2011 // Category: Culture, Gender equality, Media, Philosophy and Theory, Politics
In her first book, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism, journalist and activist Laurie Penny argues that the commodification, sexual objectification and degradation of women’s bodies, is key to maintaining advanced capitalist societies. If women said ‘No’ – no to pornification, no...
01 August, 2011 // Category: Culture, Gender equality, Media, Philosophy and Theory, Politics
In her first book, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism, journalist and activist Laurie Penny argues that the commodification, sexual objectification and degradation of women’s bodies, is key to maintaining advanced capitalist societies. If women said ‘No’ – no to pornification, no...
26 July, 2011 // Category: Corporate power, Culture, Media, Politics, Racism
In his classic text The Sociological Imagination, C Wright Mills observed that ‘men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction… the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live.’ [1] He argued that the job of...
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