Kevin Blowe on how allegations of extremism are used to discredit social movements in the United Kingdom. So where on Earth do we go from here? The socialist filmmaker explains how his anti-austerity politics translates to the big screen. European Commission gives boost to Vietnamese timber launderers. A treaty signed by the European Commission legitimized a Vietnamese government agency that facilitated the theft of roughly Chagossians urge caution over UN legal win. Corbyn vs the nation.
Jeremy Corbyn is an internationalist. But the British economy is hardwired to extract profit from the Global South. Looking through Five Eyes. Phil Miller reports. Brexit and the dark arts. Steve Topple fears not. Will Brexit backfire with lawsuits? Nick Dowson asks if Brexit will expose the UK to being sued. Mike Leigh on class war and political hope.
Ahead of his upcoming film, Peterloo, Mike Leigh speaks to Sam Thompson about cinema, history and politics.
What we saw at The World Transformed. An anti-imperialist Labour Party? What can Corbyn bring to the table? Richard Seymour asks. The UK must stop aid to failing private schools.
How did we get to the point where two African countries are trying to shut down our aid funded schools? Nick Dearden asks. These latest announcements look like a modern-day scramble for Africa, Kate Osamor writes.
The somewhat charmless new town of Basildon had been built from onwards, 25 miles east of London, to deal with the population overspill from the capital after so much housing was devastated in the Blitz.
The first residents moved in during , mostly from the East End. A major boundary change before created what should have been a safe Labour seat, hence Proctor moving to the new, safe Tory seat of Billericay: but David Amess, who fought Basildon, won it in that landslide year, and held it until , when another set of boundary changes, and another landslide, gave it to New Labour. However, Jerry Hayes won it for the Tories in and held it until , when it too went to Labour.
For something had changed in the preceding 20 years that Blair recognised. It was that — whether the left liked it or not — Thatcherism had changed the currency of politics, notably by helping people who had grown up considering themselves working class to acquire some of the advantages of the middle class.
One obvious means of this was enabling people to buy their council properties, and it spread far beyond Basildon and Harlow, even though the policy later resulted in housing shortages for a new generation. Driving through most of southern England in the s one noted former council houses being cosmetically transformed — new front doors, new windows, repainting — to symbolise the choice that came with ownership.
But Thatcherism did something even more useful for the denizens of Basildon and other new or expanded, predominantly working-class towns on the London periphery — such as Harlow, Stevenage, Hemel Hempstead, Bracknell and Crawley. The unthinking left instinctively associated Thatcherism with benefiting the well-heeled establishment, but Thatcher herself saw the establishment, with its vested interests and club-like atmosphere, as inherently anti-competitive, and wanted to break it up.
The deregulation of the City of London in , the so-called Big Bang, brought competition that wrecked old networks that put the old school, college or regimental tie ahead of commercial ability. Since Basildon has had two parliamentary seats, both of them Conservative. The Conservatives did not just borrow Labour votes in , they acquired them permanently, but for the New Labour interregnum from to This has become true of all sorts of constituencies in southern England since The phenomenon has implications for the immediate future: both for the Conservatives who wish to do to Redcar and Blyth and Bishop Auckland what they did for Basildon or Harlow, but more to the point for Labour.
For the government the easy part is over; now it will need to prove it continues to understand the new working-class Tories by finding an equivalent of council house sales or the Big Bang to ensure permanent improvements to their lives, and satisfaction of their aspirations.
By then such voters will also want the proof of their own eyes that public services are working far better than they are now. And standards must improve in primary and secondary schools, so that we end the shameful situation of the better universities being pressured to lower the bar for student admissions, and instead have secondary schools that supply an abundance of well-qualified potential undergraduates and that achieve better results at A-level.
Better education and an improved local economy will in time help alleviate social problems, but so too would a better police force. The very least the government must seek to do is to restore numbers to where they were before the disastrous cuts implemented by Theresa May as home secretary in There has been much talk of the so-called Northern Powerhouse — a term coined by George Osborne.
Although HS2 would be a waste of money in that it would mostly enable people to reach the already overwhelmed and highly expensive capital from Birmingham slightly faster than at present, opening up the corridor between Liverpool and Hull would bring real value to communities along the way. It would bring jobs to parts of east Lancashire and west Yorkshire that were bypassed by the economic revolution that has occurred in the south, and particularly in the south-east, since , and would encourage migration to those areas if coupled with other economic initiatives.
A study by Warwick University researchers confirmed that Brexit was more popular among poorer voters. Start your trial subscription today ———————————————————————————————. Jeremy Corbyn, who led Labour into the last election, has spent his career campaigning against poverty and in favour of more state support for people on low incomes. That seemed like an ambitious goal even before the economy was hit by the Covid pandemic.
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