Britain | Links

Britain: What sort of anti-war movement do we need today? (Plus response from Stop the War Coalition)

Shocking omissions: "Capitalism’s conscience – 200 years of 'The Guardian'"

Britain: On the Coronavirus and the social crisis - An open letter to the Trade Union movement from Labour Transformed

Britain: How should the left and labour movement respond to coronavirus?

Britain: Analysing a disastrous result

The Brexit election – from revenge to resistance

By Ray M

February 5, 2020 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from RS21 — This essay follows on from two recent articles. The first was written before polling day and defined the election as the ‘Revenge Election’. It argued that Labour needed to articulate the desire for revenge felt by working-class people who have suffered years of neoliberalism, austerity and injustice. The second article, written after the election, drew on Mark Fisher’s 2009 book Capitalist Realism to explain the failure of the Corbyn-led Labour Party to present an alternative that convinced enough working-class people to vote for them in 2019; Labour’s manoeuvring over Brexit between 2017 and 2019 made Corbyn seem more like another establishment politician. This piece builds on these, drawing on Enzo Traverso’s reflections on ‘militancy coming from mourning’ to outline a framework for how we understand the defeat with suggestions about how we begin to rebuild. We need a strategy that transcends the current culture war and unites our class against both the radical right-wing Tory government and the metropolitan liberals from the ‘extreme centre’.[1]

Britain: 2019 election analysis – A victory for the Far Right. A crisis for the Left

British politics in tumult

Britain: Gordon Brown’s self-exoneration rings hollow

Review by Alex Miller My Life, Our Times
By Gordon Brown
Bodley Head, £16.99, 500 pages December 13, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Gordon Brown went from being a creditable left-wing British Labour MP in the 1980s to Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) under Tony Blair from 1997-2007 and then Prime Minister from 2007, until his defeat at the hands of the Conservatives in 2010. As co-architect of New Labour, he became a champion of business elites, the private sector, the ultra-wealthy, globalisation, private finance initiatives (PFIs), public-private partnerships (PPP), privatisation, financialisation, and just about any neoliberal policy you care to mention. In this dismal and depressing autobiography, he attempts to portray himself as a progressive opponent of neoliberalism and tries to relieve himself of culpability in New Labour disasters, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

1968 seen from Britain

By Phil Hearse May 4, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from International Viewpoint — None of the key events of 1968 happened in Britain, but they impacted dramatically on the configuration of the Left. One socialist journal said it was “the year the ice cracked”. [1] But more realistically it was the culmination of a process of left political renewal started in 1956 when the near-simultaneous Hungarian revolution and the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt shook the British Left to its core, resulting in the emergence of the “first” New Left. [2]

La política británica en transición: la austeridad, Brexit y el desafío Corbyn

British politics in transition: Austerity, Brexit and the Corbyn challenge

By Phil Hearse February 28, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — In the middle of the harshest winter for more than a decade, Britain finds itself still gripped by the icy fingers of neoliberal austerity. Both the health service (NHS) and local government stagger from crisis to crisis, as savage spending cuts by Theresa May’s Conservative government make the provision of adequate services – those used mainly by the elderly, disabled people, the ill, the poor and the homeless – impossible. Eight years of austerity and harsh pay restraint among public sector workers have pushed economic growth into a nosedive, sharply reducing tax income, thus giving a further twist to the knife of Tory cutbacks.