Category Archives: Interventions

A Time for Anger: Sociology and the NHS

There are times when it is appropriate, even necessary, to be angry and to shout out. I’m presently in a local café trying hard to restrain myself. I have two immediate sources of irritation (and many more lurking around). These are: (1) the reviewers’ reasons for calling for a second set of revisions to our… Read More »

Growing Wealth Inequality During COVID

A new report from the Resolution Foundation tells of a widening of the wealth gap in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. The short summary that follows is indebted to Larry Elliot’s summary on 12 June in the Guardian. In terms of wealth, the richest 10% of the population have gained £50,000 on average, dwarfing… Read More »

Muckraking Sociology, the NHS & COVID

We have written a paper on the salience of ‘muckraking sociology’ in the era of COVID which has (1) been rejected by a mainstream sociology journal, in part because it apparently doesn’t publish ‘polemical pieces’, and (2) returned to us with a request for a second set of revisions by a specialist health sociology journal,… Read More »

Sociology and ‘Systematically Distorted Communication’

Today my co-authors and I have withdrawn a manuscript under consideration in a well-regarded international journal. We were invited to make a second set of revisions to a paper on ‘muckraking sociology, the NHS and COVID’, but felt that to agree to yet more revisions/compromises would be a step too far, not least in a… Read More »

Open Letter to Corbyn and McDonnell

OPEN LETTER TO JEREMY CORBYN AND JOHN McDONNELL 7 May 2021 Dear Jeremy and John, I have been following the Hartlepool by-election and local election results from yesterday’s ballots. They are grim results for the Labour Party, even if not much of a surprise to many of us. But they have set me thinking again… Read More »

‘Social Murder’ and the Labour Party

A Canadian colleague and kindred spirit, Dennis Raphael, recently sent me a copy of a pamphlet prepared by the Medical Research Group of the Labour Research Department entitled ‘Social Murder’ and published – ‘price twopence’ – in 1934. It has extraordinary resonance today and warrants a summary. It starts, appropriately enough, with a seminal quotation… Read More »

Bourdieu, Sociology and Activism

I have often pondered on what I have, or more to the point haven’t, contributed to the socialist movement. My record of activism is certainly parsimonious compared with others I know. I once blogged on what I see as an elective affinity between sociology, education and socialism, at the back of my mind a sense… Read More »

Marmot, COVID and Health Inequalities

There have been times when I wished that Michael Marmot would attend to what I – as a sociologist – regard as root or fundamental causes of health inequalities, that he would talk and write about capitalism and class division and conflict. We have talked about this. He is of course an epidemiologist not a… Read More »

Local (Peace & Justice) Coordination Groups

As a democratic socialist who left the Labour Party after it became clear that Keir Starmer had no intention of sticking with the kinds of socialist policies that Labour stood on in the 2019 general election, I have like many felt uncertain about the way ahead. I welcomed the initiative of the Corbyn Project and… Read More »

Sociology, Education, Socialism

The temptation to dismiss people who act against their own interests as ‘stupid’ should be resisted. How often did we hear that working-class ‘northerners’ who voted Brexit, or for an Old Etonian charlatan as PM, were ‘beyond stupid’ and deserved their inevitable punishment? Of course there exists a long history of sociologists trying to explain… Read More »