Buried deep in my laptop’s memory is a letter I wrote to the editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine following the infamous London riots. It was intended as a corrective to a ‘biomedical’ examination by a Dr Misselbrook of the underlying causal mechanisms that shaped the young rioters’ behaviour. As a… Read More »
There is widespread unease at the sharpening divisions between the haves and the have-nots within the UK and within and between countries worldwide since the onset of financial capitalism in the mid-1970s. At different times and in different places and contexts this unease has fed into serious rebellions and uprisings in the early 21st century.… Read More »
Like many others I purchased a copy of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century early on. One of Heffers sales people mentioned in passing that a Yale rep had told him it was the most significant book they have published in a generation. That was enough for me. But it is a big fat book… Read More »
There is a dearth of information on the composition of what I have called governing oligarchies in countries like the UK and the USA. This includes data on top income earners. In his The Killing Fields of Inequality (Cambridge; Polity Press, 2014), however, Goran Therborn cites data from the US Congressional Budget Office (2011) on the composition… Read More »
I am reading Tony Benn’s latest, and last, diaries: A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine. They make poignant reading, charting his growing frailty and his focus on ageing as well as his extraordinary day-to-day commitment to his socialist causes. You feel he needs to stay engaged because it is extrinsically as well as intrinsically worthwhile; it… Read More »
I have at various times and in various places advocated a form of engagement for change that I have called ‘permanent reform’. The basic idea is that if sufficient people can be mobilized around the righting of a number of incontrovertible wrongs, once mobilized they will up for more activism to secure more and yet… Read More »