09 May, 2012 // Category: Economy, Employment & Welfare, Labour movement, The Right
Let’s start with a question: if I asked you to think of a place that sums up what’s wrong with Britain, where would you choose? For some people, it’s the City of London: all those bankers who broke the economy just a few years ago and are now back to business as usual - complete, of course, with...
19 April, 2012 // Category: Economy, History
This has been written as a response to Jason Hickel's recent article for NLP on neoliberalism. While I have sympathy with Hickel’s arguments (and have actually made similar ones in the past myself), I want to take issue with a specific part of these arguments, namely how he has characterized...
09 April, 2012 // Category: Corporate power, Economy, History, International, Vision/Strategy
As a university lecturer, I often find that my students take today’s dominant economic ideology – namely, neoliberalism – for granted as natural and inevitable. This is not entirely surprising given that most of them were born in the early 1990s, for neoliberalism is all that they have known. In...
29 March, 2012 // Category: Activism, Corporate power, Economy, Employment & Welfare, Labour movement, Politics, Vision/Strategy
Last week NLP attended the launch of a new book, Public Service on the Brink – a timely edited collection describing the denigration of the public service ethos over the last three decades. Tom Mills spoke to one of the book’s contributors, the PCS’s General Secretary Mark Serwotka, about the...
22 March, 2012 // Category: Economy, Politics
We know by now that George Osborne is a species of economic illiterate. Cutting government spending in a weak economy makes the economy weaker, not stronger. Demand falls, meaning firms sell less. If firms sell less, they cut wages and make redundancies. A vicious circle is established. And firms...
14 March, 2012 // Category: Corporate power, Economy, Employment & Welfare, History, International, Philosophy and Theory, Politics, The Right
Dieter Plehwe is a Senior Fellow at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin and the co-editor with Philip Mirowski of The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. In the second of a two part interview he spoke to NLP’s Tom Mills about the relationship between...
02 March, 2012 // Category: Economy, Employment & Welfare, History, Vision/Strategy
Profiteering energy companies raise average bills to record levels. Train fares climb up to 8% above inflation. Rents in places like London are at an all time high. All this against a background of real wage stagnation, increasing unemployment and creeping inflation: what has the British left’s...
27 February, 2012 // Category: Economy
In my January column I explained that by stonewalling financial regulatory reform and imposing draconian fiscal austerity in the midst of the worst economic recession in eighty years ruling elites in Europe, the US, and Canada have us on track for what amounts to economic suicide, putting the...
10 February, 2012 // Category: Economy, Employment & Welfare, Labour movement, Philosophy and Theory, Vision/Strategy
Introduction: Standing for the precariat In its current formulation, the concept of ‘the precariat’ is unconvincing, impressionistic and certainly tinged with millennial Weltschmerz. It is Guy Standing of Bath University who has done the most to popularise the concept and, at the same time,...
27 January, 2012 // Category: Activism, Economy
Robin Hahnel is Professor of Economics at Portland State University. His most recent book is Economic Justice and Democracy and he is co-author with Michael Albert of The Political Economy of Participatory Economics. In the first of a series of regular columns for NLP Hahnel considers whether the...
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