The media

Five arguments about why Labour lost

“Labour has lost the working class” Over the years, but particularly in the Brexit era, older people have swung to the right and younger people to the left. In 1983 18-24 year olds backed Thatcher over Labour by 9 points, while over-65s backed Labour by 6. This time 18-24s backed Labour 57-19, while over-65s backed the Tories 62-18! Among women voters aged 18-24, only 15% went Tory. Older people are more and more over-represented in areas where Labour lost the bulk of its seats, and young people more and more under-represented. And older people are much more likely to turn out and vote. What...

The racism in “gang” panics

I want to start with a bit of a disclaimer. I first became deeply interested in the topic of crime and policing in response to a wave of gang violence that was plaguing the area of North West London I call home. I say this to illustrate that there are instances where gangs are the culprit. It isn’t my intention to delegitimise or trivialise those situations. However, in the words of an unnamed senior Met officer talking to Amnesty International: “Gangs are, for the most part, a complete red herring… fixation with the term is unhelpful at every level.” That hasn’t stopped all major police...

Social media, politics, and the "Schweitzer model"

The decade-and-a-bit since the 2008 crash has been a distinct period of capitalism in economic and in political terms. It has also been a distinct period in the technology of political communications. Twitter "took off" around 2007, Facebook "took off" around 2009, mass use of smartphones "took off" about the same time. For a few years now, more web browsing has been done via smartphones than via computers. Tablets and e-readers, once said to be the wave of the future, have lagged. Many young people today get their news of the world via social media, rather than via newspapers or TV news shows...

Corbyn in the 1980s

The Times of 6 July 2019 ran an article by Dominic Kennedy, "Corbyn's hard-left blueprint revealed", attacking Jeremy Corbyn for his links in the 1980s with Socialist Organiser , a forerunner of Solidarity . Sean Matgamna, editor of Socialist Organiser in the period described, talked to Solidarity . We have serious political differences with Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. But Corbyn has the record of an honorable, serious left-winger, who - unlike many others who had some association with Socialist Organiser in the 1980s - did not change his coat in the years of Blair's New...

Depths of denial

Keith Kahn Harris’s book sets out to be a short analysis on what drives a lot of conspiracy theories: denial. People deny climate change, the effectiveness of vaccines, or the Holocaust. Kahn Harris explains succinctly where some of these conspiracies are driven from — helplessness in a world that leads the less informed to believing the conspiracy of someone with an alternative agenda. But the book is short in length and short on answers. Kahn Harris makes a distinction. “Denial” is the act of denying something, for example, claiming that you can smoke just one more cigarette and quit easily...

True, but never mind that...

"These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one's eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened ... and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late" - George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942) On April 7, the Sunday Times carried a front page lead story claiming that the Labour party has failed to take action against hundreds of members accused of antisemitism. The story was apparently based upon leaked emails and a database from Labour’s HQ. The details were shocking...

Telling the truth about wars

The career of the journalist Marie Colvin was fairly unique. She covered most of the major conflicts of the 1990s and 2000s up until her death in Homs, Syria, in 2012. Her articles in the Sunday Times brought across some of the horrors of war, not just the conflicts between political factions and leaders but the stories of mass graves in Fallujah, and the near starvation of internally displaced Tamils. Until her death she may be remembered as one of the last journalists to interview Colonel Gadaffi before he was killed in the Libyan conflict of 2011. The film, based on a Vanity Fair article,...

Democracy and social media

The scandal surrounding how Facebook shared with a Cambridge psychologist, and his firm (Global Science Research) the personal information of 50 million users, without their explicit consent, has revealed a gruesome network of right-wing academic, political and business connections. GSR’s data, mined in 2014, was sold on to the data analytics company Cambridge Analytica (CA). The company is partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund manager who supports right wing causes, including Brexit. Its director and CEO is Alexander James Ashburner Nix. CA is affiliated to the...

Behind Wakanda’s utopian vision

Firstly, I like Black Panther as a character. My first introduction him was in the highly acclaimed (and short lived) Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes TV series from 2010. The portrayal of this character was that of a stoic, no nonsense, quiet member of the team, who relied on his instincts and intellect to overcome more powerful enemies. I then decided to read up on him and encountered him in the Fantastic Four comics taking on the ‘Silver Surfer’, again using his superior intellect to take on the all-powerful herald of Galactus, and defeat him. In my eyes, Black Panther was effectively the...

Messing up our minds

"Steve Bartlett, the company’s 25-year-old co-founder, regularly boasts to potential clients that he can make any hashtag trend on Twitter before he’s finished his presentation". The Observer (14 January) reported on how Bartlett and his now multi-million pound company Social Chain shape how marketing is done on social media. The report also sheds light on the low quality and corrupting effect of political argument carried out on social media - how it smothers real debate and investigation, and replaces it by constant churning of scandal and flame-warring. "People share feelings, not...

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