Tag: brexit

  • Why the EU matters for the future of the climate 

    I’ll add this to reigning in big tech as the best argument I can see for supporting the EU. Could any other power structure in Europe achieve this outcome? From pg 137 of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: A 2012 report by the German National Center for Aerospace, Energy and Transport Research (DLR), for instance, […]

  • Taking back control: what happens when people realise they were lied to?

    The trope of ‘taking back control’ has become ever more prominent within political life, explicitly in the case of the Brexit movement but implicitly in a whole range of other movements from Trumpism to Corbynism. In their thought provoking, if at times unpersuasive, critique of Corbynism (Corbynism: A Critical Approach) Frederick Harry Pitts and Matt Bolton […]

  • Optimism as a political factor in Brexit Britain

    In the last few years I’ve been struggling to make sense of optimism as a political factor. It struck me during the pre-refendum debate that the case being made by someone like Daniel Hannan, with his neo-mercantilist vision of a post-EU Britain, could be seen as considerably more optimistic than anything being offered by the remain camp. […]

  • Austerity politics as reactionary populism

    I thought this was an excellent account in Corbynism: A Critical Approach by Frederick Harry Pitts and Matt Bolton. From loc 627: Austerity is often taken to have caused the contemporary rise of populism. In retrospect, however, it is abundantly clear that austerity itself was a populist project –both in Chantal Mouffe’s sense of the creation […]

  • An interview with Stand Up magazine about social media and fragile politics

    Social media is often accused of being an echo chamber, but has it played a role in empowering marginalised people and elevating their voices? It has and it’s important that we don’t lose sight of this when we focus on the problems which social media is creating for politics. In recent years, cyber-utopianism has been […]

  • A wonderful example of how universities can use YouTube

    There’s a background to this hugely succesful engagement project here:

  • When did optimism become a characteristic possessed by the right and lacked by the left?

    Why did the only positive vision of Britain’s future come from right-wing Brexit advocates? That’s the question I’m preoccupied by having read Why Vote Leave by Daniel Hannan. Take this for example, from loc 1903-1917: It’s 2020, and the UK is flourishing outside of the EU. The rump Union, now a united bloc, continues its […]