Jeremy Corbyn

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Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Brixton riot, centre right, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, falling living standards, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, open borders, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

19 Falkirk and Collins 20 The Road to 2015 21 The 2015 General Election part six: The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn; The Summer of Love 22 The Establishment 23 The Insurgents 24 Throwing it Away part seven: The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn; The Summer of Redemption 25 From Swarm to Momentum 26 Learning on the Job 27 The Referendum 28 The Chicken Coup 29 The Importance of 2016 part eight: The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn; The Summer of Fun 30 The Apotheosis – The 2017 General Election 31 Consolidation part nine: The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn; The Long, Hot Summer 32 The Baggage of the Past 33 The Dialogue of the Deaf 34 The Wheel Turns part ten: Brexit and Beyond 35 The Shadow of Brexit 36 The Fault Lines Exposed 37 Epilogue Acknowledgements Index Plates Preface In May 2015, Ed Miliband became the latest in a long line of Labour party leaders to lose a general election.

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This would become more obvious at the party conference in September, but in March it would be overtaken by a much bigger set of issues that would occupy the NEC, LOTO and Jeremy Corbyn for the next six months. The challenge now came from Corbyn’s own past. part nine The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn: The Long, Hot Summer ‘Jeremy Corbyn; Labour is not a threat to Jewish life in Britain’ Guardian, 2018 32 The Baggage of the Past After three years of success, there was bound to be a rebound. From the euphoria of winning the leadership, beating off the 2016 attempt to remove him and the surprise of the 2017 general election, Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters could afford to focus on solidifying their position within the party and prepare their appeal to the wider electorate.

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Like David Cameron, she could use a public vote to reinforce discipline within her own party. She could get a mandate to push forward her version of Brexit and then establish a government in her image. On 18 April she announced a general election for 8 June 2017. part eight The Four Summers of Jeremy Corbyn: The Summer of Fun ‘Ohhh, Jeremy Corbyn’ Glastonbury Crowd, 2017 30 The Apotheosis; The 2017 General Election Jeremy Corbyn had won every fight since 2015. The introduction of OMOV, the impact of social media and the disorganisation and failures of his opponents in the PLP had combined to give him an unassailable position as leader. In normal times he would be facing three years before a general election in which to develop a style and leadership qualities within the House of Commons.

Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

, Telegraph, 19 April 2017. 43Graeme Demianyk, ‘Jeremy Corbyn was NOT “dancing a jig” before Remembrance Sunday service’, Huffington Post, 13 November 2016. 44Jon Craig, ‘Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn denies supporting or meeting IRA’, Sky News, 26 May 2017 45Andrew Gilligan, ‘Revealed: Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell’s close IRA links’, Telegraph, 10 October 2015; Claire Newell, Hayley Dixon, Luke Heighton, and Harry Yorke, ‘Exclusive: MI5 opened file on Jeremy Corbyn amid concerns over his IRA links’, Telegraph, 19 May 2017; Laura Hughes and Edward Malnick, ‘Revealed: Jeremy Corbyn’s three decades of blocking terror legislation’, Telegraph, 26 May 2017; Richard Dearlove, ‘Corbyn would not be allowed into security services, so he’s not fit for No 10’, Telegraph, 8 June 2017. 46Sean O’Callaghan, ‘Jeremy Corbyn might not have planted a bomb but he made it easier for those who did, says former IRA man’, Sun, 22 May 2017; Tom Newton Dunn, ‘Jeremy Corbyn boosted morale of IRA killers with his support and prolonged the violence leading to more deaths, IRA killer reveals’, Sun, 22 May 2017; Sean O’Callaghan, ‘Finucane should not have been killed – but he was in the IRA’, Telegraph, 18 April 2013; Cory Collusion Inquiry Report: Patrick Finucane, House of Commons, April 2004. 47David Trayner, ‘Claims Jeremy Corbyn funded “IRA bomber” turn out to be 30 years old – and inaccurate’, Independent, 20 September 2015. 48‘Jeremy Corbyn quizzed over IRA comments’, ITV News, 21 May 2017; Jessica Elgot, ‘Johnson accuses Corbyn of siding with UK’s enemies in fight on terror’, Guardian, 6 June 2017; Robert Booth, Martin Belam, and Maeve McClenaghan, ‘Tory attack ad misrepresents Corbyn views on IRA, says Labour’, Guardian, 2 June 2017. 49Kate Devlin, ‘Labour MPs urge Smith to attack Corbyn over IRA’, Evening Times, 18 August 2016; Kate McCann, ‘Labour’s Stoke candidate branded Jeremy Corbyn “IRA supporting friend of Hamas” and criticised Brexit’, Telegraph, 27 January 2017. 50James Forsythe, ‘Jeremy Corbyn always blames Britain first’, Spectator, 28 May 2017; Simon Heffer, ‘Jeremy Corbyn has long hated Britain’, Telegraph, 28 May 2017; editorial, ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s intervention on terror is tasteless and wrong’, Telegraph, 26 May 2017; Steve Hawkes, ‘RED FLAG: outrage as it’s revealed Jeremy Corbyn will claim Britain’s war on terror is to blame for Manchester terror attack’, Sun, 25 May 2017; editorial, ‘An important speech from Jeremy Corbyn – but made at the wrong time’, Independent, 26 May 2017; Matthew Smith, ‘Jeremy Corbyn is on the right side of public opinion on foreign policy: except for the Falklands’, YouGov, 30 May 2017. 51Tom Batchelor, ‘British voters overwhelmingly back Labour’s manifesto policies, poll finds’, Independent, 11 May 2017. 52Will Dahlgren, ‘Voters choose greater equality over greater wealth’, YouGov, 30 April 2014; Will Dahlgren, ‘Nationalise energy and rail companies, say public’, YouGov, 4 November 2013; Patrick Butler, ‘UK survey finds huge support for ending austerity’, Guardian, 28 June 2017. 53Editorial, ‘The Guardian view on the Labour election manifesto: widening the bounds of the thinkable’, Guardian, 16 May 2017; editorial, ‘The Observer’s view on the Labour manifesto’, Observer, 14 May 2017; Andrew Grice, ‘Labour’s manifesto will be popular, but this election is about trust, not policies’, Independent, 16 May 2017; Nick Robinson, ‘No one should be surprised …’, Twitter.com, 20 May 2017; Jeremy Culley, ‘REVEALED: Labour plans to “TREBLE Council Tax plunging people into negative equity”’, Daily Star, 30 May 2017; Gordon Rayner, ‘Tax on homes “to treble under Labour plans for Land Value Tax”’, Telegraph, 29 May 2017; Jon Stone, ‘Labour looks to replace Council Tax with a Land Value Tax’, Independent, 16 May 2017. 54Macer Hall, ‘May’s plan for a Fairer Britain’, Daily Express, 18 May 2017; editorial, ‘DAILY MAIL COMMENT: as Mrs May unveils her manifesto, at last, we have a PM who is not afraid to be honest’, Daily Mail, 19 May 2017; editorial, ‘THE SUN SAYS: never in our history has a UK election thrown up such a clear-cut and obvious choice for Sun readers’, Sun, 19 May 2017; editorial, ‘The Guardian view on Theresa May’s manifesto: a new Toryism’, Guardian, 18 May 2017. 55Dawn Foster, ‘Theresa May’s manifesto shows that she is more right wing than Cameron ever dared to be’, Independent, 18 May 2017. 56Robert Booth, ‘Conservatives launch online offensive against Corbyn’, Guardian, 15 May 2017. 57Nicholas Cecil, ‘How Jeremy Corbyn beat Theresa May in the social media election war’, Evening Standard, 14 June 2017. 58Jim Waterson and Tom Phillips, ‘People on Facebook only want to share pro-Corbyn, anti-Tory news stories’, Buzzfeed, 7 May 2017; Ben Kentish, ‘Tories “spent more than £1m” on negative Facebook adverts attacking Jeremy Corbyn’, Independent, 11 June 2017; Giles Turner and Jeremy Kahn, ‘U.K.

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., The Best of Benn: Letters, Diaries, Speeches and Other Writings, London: Hutchinson, 2014, Kindle Loc. 621. 6Hilary Wainwright and Leo Panitch, ‘“What we’ve achieved so far”: an interview with Jeremy Corbyn’, Red Pepper, December 2015. 7Quoted in Nigel Cawthorne, Jeremy Corbyn: Leading from the Left, London: Endeavour Press Ltd, 2015, Kindle Loc. 180. 8Rosa Prince, Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup: How Jeremy Corbyn Stormed to the Labour Leadership, London: Biteback Publishing, 2016. 9Jessica Elgot, ‘Jeremy Corbyn caught looking gloomy on night bus’, Guardian, 1 August 2015. 10Quoted in Nigel Cawthorne, Jeremy Corbyn: Leading from the Left, London: Endeavour Press Ltd, 2015, Kindle Loc. 238. 11Jeremy Corbyn, ‘Building the Social Movement’, in Tom Unterrainer, ed., Corbyn’s Campaign, Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 2016. 12Hilary Wainwright and Leo Panitch, ‘“What we’ve achieved so far”: an interview with Jeremy Corbyn’, Red Pepper, December 2015. 13Phil Burton-Cartledge, interview with the author, 19 February 2016. 14Hardeep Matharu, ‘Britain could be more left-wing than people assume, study finds’, The Independent, 15 January 2016. 15Sam Webb, ‘Jeremy Corbyn gets hero’s welcome at refugee rally on day he becomes Labour leader’, Mirror, 12 September 2015. 16Larry Elliott, ‘OECD calls for less austerity and more public investment’, Guardian, 18 February 2016. 17Will Dahlgreen, ‘British people keener on socialism than capitalism’, YouGov, 23 February 2016. 1.

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Two Years Before the Mast: Corbyn’s Subaltern Leadership 1Jane Merrick and Mark Leftly, ‘Jeremy Corbyn: Labour MPs are plotting a coup against the potential leader if he is elected’, Independent, 18 July 2015; Christopher Hope, ‘Jeremy Corbyn could face Labour MPs’ coup “within days of being elected leader”’, Telegraph, 20 August 2015; Adam Bienkov, ‘Labour MPs plotting coup against Jeremy Corbyn “on day one”’, Politics.co.uk, 12 August 2015. 2Tim Ross and Emily Gosden, ‘Jeremy Corbyn faces coup plot if he wins Labour leadership’, Telegraph, 27 July 2015. 3Alison Little, ‘Lord Mandelson implores Labour to delay coup against Jeremy Corbyn’, Express, 25 September 2015. 4Heather Stewart and Rowena Mason, ‘Leaked list of “hostile” Labour MPs lays bare party divisions’, Guardian, 23 March 2016; Anushka Asthana, ‘Labour MPs back call for Jeremy Corbyn to stand down’, Guardian, 25 March 2016. 5Jamie Stern-Weiner, ‘Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t got an “antisemitism problem”.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

v=JaxApp3kkVI 9. https://twitter.com/lukeakehurst/status/606154157318356993 10. http://islingtonrefugeeforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IRF-Refugee-Week-June-15-Report-Final-docx.pdf 11. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/15/labour-leftwinger-jeremy-corbyn-wins-place-on-ballot-for-leadership 12. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/social-media-could-blow-apart-labours-race-qhhz8360fx3 13. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11745648/Labour-behaving-like-a-petulant-child-warns-Chuka-Umunna.html 14. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/jul/22/tony-blair-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-video 15. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11741861/How-you-can-help-Jeremy-Corbyn-win-and-destroy-the-Labour-Party.html 16. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11680016/Why-Tories-should-join-Labour-and-back-Jeremy-Corbyn.html 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11776925/A-Corbyn-victory-in-the-Labour-leadership-battle-would-be-a-disaster.html 18. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11767152/Tories-dont-vote-for-Jeremy-Corbyn.-It-wont-end-well.html CHAPTER 3 1. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/heres-what-jeremy-corbyn-really-6438877 2. https://pressgazette.co.uk/sun-and-mail-online-both-take-down-stories-claiming-jeremy-corbyn-was-dancing-a-jig-on-way-to-cenotaph/ 3. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ridiculous-ways-the-media-misrepresents-jeremy-corbyn-2015-12 4. http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/projects/corbyn/Cobyn-Report.pdf 5. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/12/bbc-bias-labour-sir-michael-lyons 6. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/were-labours-antisemitism-failures-really-corbyns-fault/ 7. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/diane-abbott-abuse-female-mps-trolling-racism-sexism-almost-half-total-amnesty-poll-a7931126.html 8. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11764159/Jeremy-Corbyn-faces-coup-plot-if-he-wins-Labour-leadership.html 9. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/plot-to-oust-corbyn-on-day-one-2jk7cw8rrkn 10. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/20/jeremy-corbyns-honeymoon-period-will-last-until-local-elections 11. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/owen-jones-right-are-mocking-jeremy-corbyn-because-secretly-they-fear-him 12. https://twitter.com/shamindernahal/status/644214378296905728 13. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/temporary-nationalisation-of-threatened-tata-steel-plants-is-an-option-minister-confirms-a6959201.html 14. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/23/poll-junior-doctors-support 15. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/12021973/Jeremy-Corbyn-faces-humiliation-as-more-than-100-Labour-MPs-plan-to-defy-leader-over-Syria-air-strikes.html 16. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/saudi-arabia-yemen-labour-mps-debate-bombing-intervention-woodcock-a7382706.html 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/30/pmqs-jeremy-corbyn-takes-theresa-may-as-conservatives-edge-towards/ 18. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/06/30/labour-members-corbyn-post-brexit 19. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeremy-corbyn-parliamentary-labour-party-plp-meeting-told-to-quit-margaret-hodge-alan-johnson_uk_5771819ee4b08d2c5639bfc0 20. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/29/labour-mps-vs-corbyn-war-party-members-tories-brexit 21. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/thousands-of-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-march-on-parliament-against-labour-party-leadership-challenge-a7106511.html 22. https://twitter.com/aliceperryuk/status/753663563546451969 23. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/20/owen-smith-i-have-never-advocated-privatisation-of-the-nhs 24. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/listen-moment-owen-smith-made-8759470 25. https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/0cpa7iw5l7/TimesResults_160830_LabourSelectorate.pdf CHAPTER 4 1. https://news.sky.com/story/corbyns-cabinet-chaos-the-inside-story-10346377 2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/29/counterweight-us-power-global-necessity-conflicts-spread 3. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/14/labour-and-tories-level-corbyn-popularity-wanes-poll 4. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/john-mcdonnell-defends-jeremy-corbyn-russia-response-nerve-agent-a8261946.html 5. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/11/labour-mps-should-not-appear-on-russia-today-says-john-mcdonnell 6. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2017/jan/18/theresa-mays-brexit-speech-what-the-national-newspapers-say 7. https://medium.com/@OwenJones84/questions-all-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-need-to-answer-b3e82ace7ed3 8. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/01/corbyn-staying-not-good-enough 9. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/09/clive-lewis-sounds-support-challenge-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leader/ 10. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/69w7np/glastonbury-dispatches-tom-watson-mp CHAPTER 5 1. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tories-open-up-24-point-10259681 2. http://www.politico.eu/article/jeremy-corbyn-less-popular-than-donald-trump-poll/?

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-It-wont-end-well.html CHAPTER 3 1. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/heres-what-jeremy-corbyn-really-6438877 2. https://pressgazette.co.uk/sun-and-mail-online-both-take-down-stories-claiming-jeremy-corbyn-was-dancing-a-jig-on-way-to-cenotaph/ 3. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ridiculous-ways-the-media-misrepresents-jeremy-corbyn-2015-12 4. http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/projects/corbyn/Cobyn-Report.pdf 5. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/12/bbc-bias-labour-sir-michael-lyons 6. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/were-labours-antisemitism-failures-really-corbyns-fault/ 7. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/diane-abbott-abuse-female-mps-trolling-racism-sexism-almost-half-total-amnesty-poll-a7931126.html 8. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11764159/Jeremy-Corbyn-faces-coup-plot-if-he-wins-Labour-leadership.html 9. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/plot-to-oust-corbyn-on-day-one-2jk7cw8rrkn 10. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/20/jeremy-corbyns-honeymoon-period-will-last-until-local-elections 11. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/owen-jones-right-are-mocking-jeremy-corbyn-because-secretly-they-fear-him 12. https://twitter.com/shamindernahal/status/644214378296905728 13. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/temporary-nationalisation-of-threatened-tata-steel-plants-is-an-option-minister-confirms-a6959201.html 14. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/23/poll-junior-doctors-support 15. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/12021973/Jeremy-Corbyn-faces-humiliation-as-more-than-100-Labour-MPs-plan-to-defy-leader-over-Syria-air-strikes.html 16. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/saudi-arabia-yemen-labour-mps-debate-bombing-intervention-woodcock-a7382706.html 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/30/pmqs-jeremy-corbyn-takes-theresa-may-as-conservatives-edge-towards/ 18. https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/06/30/labour-members-corbyn-post-brexit 19. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jeremy-corbyn-parliamentary-labour-party-plp-meeting-told-to-quit-margaret-hodge-alan-johnson_uk_5771819ee4b08d2c5639bfc0 20. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/29/labour-mps-vs-corbyn-war-party-members-tories-brexit 21. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/thousands-of-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-march-on-parliament-against-labour-party-leadership-challenge-a7106511.html 22. https://twitter.com/aliceperryuk/status/753663563546451969 23. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/20/owen-smith-i-have-never-advocated-privatisation-of-the-nhs 24. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/listen-moment-owen-smith-made-8759470 25. https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/0cpa7iw5l7/TimesResults_160830_LabourSelectorate.pdf CHAPTER 4 1. https://news.sky.com/story/corbyns-cabinet-chaos-the-inside-story-10346377 2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/29/counterweight-us-power-global-necessity-conflicts-spread 3. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/14/labour-and-tories-level-corbyn-popularity-wanes-poll 4. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/john-mcdonnell-defends-jeremy-corbyn-russia-response-nerve-agent-a8261946.html 5. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/11/labour-mps-should-not-appear-on-russia-today-says-john-mcdonnell 6. https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2017/jan/18/theresa-mays-brexit-speech-what-the-national-newspapers-say 7. https://medium.com/@OwenJones84/questions-all-jeremy-corbyn-supporters-need-to-answer-b3e82ace7ed3 8. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/01/corbyn-staying-not-good-enough 9. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/09/clive-lewis-sounds-support-challenge-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leader/ 10. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/69w7np/glastonbury-dispatches-tom-watson-mp CHAPTER 5 1. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tories-open-up-24-point-10259681 2. http://www.politico.eu/article/jeremy-corbyn-less-popular-than-donald-trump-poll/?

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v=JaxApp3kkVI 9. https://twitter.com/lukeakehurst/status/606154157318356993 10. http://islingtonrefugeeforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/IRF-Refugee-Week-June-15-Report-Final-docx.pdf 11. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/15/labour-leftwinger-jeremy-corbyn-wins-place-on-ballot-for-leadership 12. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/social-media-could-blow-apart-labours-race-qhhz8360fx3 13. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11745648/Labour-behaving-like-a-petulant-child-warns-Chuka-Umunna.html 14. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/jul/22/tony-blair-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-video 15. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11741861/How-you-can-help-Jeremy-Corbyn-win-and-destroy-the-Labour-Party.html 16. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11680016/Why-Tories-should-join-Labour-and-back-Jeremy-Corbyn.html 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11776925/A-Corbyn-victory-in-the-Labour-leadership-battle-would-be-a-disaster.html 18. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11767152/Tories-dont-vote-for-Jeremy-Corbyn.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

Consequently, her Twitter account had just 300,000 followers, compared with 1.2 million for Jeremy Corbyn. By the end of the campaign, Corbyn’s 120,000 Instagram followers approached ten times May’s reach. Conservative campaigners looked with envy at Corbyn, eight years May’s senior but light years ahead of her as a social media campaigner. ‘They’re good at it, he likes it,’ a Tory official said. ‘They’re not afraid to take a few risks. They did a few good stunts.’ Corbyn’s best coup came on 15 May, when he ambushed a ‘Facebook live’ interview with May conducted by ITV’s political editor, Robert Peston. The Labour leader posted a question as ‘Jeremy Corbyn of Islington’, asking May, ‘Do you not think the British people deserve to see us debate, live and on TV?’

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The collapse of Ukip and Farron’s ‘gaygate’ distractions ensured that if protest voters were looking for a home, or if Theresa May faltered, Jeremy Corbyn had political space to offer working-class Brexiteers and metropolitan Liberals something different to believe in. It was an opportunity Labour was to seize with both hands. 17 Manifesto Destiny The general election of 2017 was turned on its head on the evening of Wednesday, 10 May, when James Schneider, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s media spokesmen, took two calls that sent shockwaves through Westminster. The first was from Jack Blanchard, the political editor of the Daily Mirror, one of the few papers sympathetic to Labour.

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While the Tories began the blame game over a victory that seemed like a defeat, Labour were consumed with recriminations over why a defeat that tasted like victory had not been the real thing. After a brief nap at home, Jeremy Corbyn went to Labour headquarters at 7.45 a.m. on the Friday morning, where he was greeted by a small crowd of supporters. The leader had a spring in his step. In the war room, LOTO staff on one side of the horseshoe office in their red Jeremy Corbyn T-shirts, Southsiders in dishevelled suits on the other, Corbyn addressed the assembled staff, making a gracious speech about their efforts in the campaign. ‘Nobody expected us to do well,’ he said.

Antisemitism: Here and Now by Deborah E. Lipstadt

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Cass Sunstein, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fixed income, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, Oklahoma City bombing, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Johnny Paul, “Dutch Court Fines Muslim Group for Holocaust-Denial Cartoon,” Jerusalem Post, August 28, 2010. 33. Matt Dathan, “Jeremy Corbyn Denies Links to Lebanese ‘Extremist’ Dyab Abou Jahjah—as Picture Emerges of the Two Sharing a Stage,” Independent, August 19, 2015. 34. “Corbyn Agrees BBC Are ‘Zionist Liars,’ ” Guy News, April 29, 2016, https://order-order.com/​2016/​04/​29/​corbyn-agrees-bbc-are-zionist-liars/; Henry Zeffman, “Jeremy Corbyn Hosted Event Likening Israel to Nazis,” Times (London), August 1, 2018; Yair Rosenberg, “Jeremy Corbyn’s Holocaust Memorial Day Statement Leaves Out the Jews,” Tablet, January 25, 2018. 35.

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Gabriel Pogrund, Jon Ungoed-Thomas, and Richard Kerbaj, “Vitriol and Threats of Violence: The Ugly Face of Jeremy Corbyn’s Cabal,” Times (London), April 1, 2018; Gabriel Pogrund, Jon Ungoed-Thomas, Richard Kerbaj, and Tim Shipman, “Exposed: Jeremy Corbyn’s Hate Factory,” Times (London), April 1, 2018. 42. Verity Bowman and Pippa Crerar, “Corbyn Ally Says ‘Jewish Trump Supporters Making Up’ Antisemitic Charges,” Guardian, July 31, 2018; “Jeremy Corbyn Endorses BDS Movement in 2015 Footage,” Haaretz and JTA, August 19, 2018. 43. Lee Harpin, “Anger as Diane Abbott Repeatedly Dismisses Labour’s Antisemitism Crisis as ‘a Smear Campaign,’ ” Jewish Chronicle, March 29, 2018. 44. Benjamin Kentish, “Thousands of Jeremy Corbyn Supporters Endorse Letter Saying Jewish-Organised Antisemitism Protest Was the Work of ‘Very Powerful Special Interest Group,’ ” Independent, March 29, 2018; Michael Savage, “Major Jewish Private Donor Ditches Labour over Antisemitism,” Observer, April 1, 2018. 45.

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But he has let these reprehensible genies out of the bottle. They are convinced that they have his imprimatur. And he has not disabused them of that notion. Once they are out, it will be very difficult to get them back in. In my next letter I will deal with Jeremy Corbyn, the British Member of Parliament and head of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. Yours, DEL Dear Oxford Students: Jeremy Corbyn’s record in politics is not only far more extensive than Trump’s, it’s also more deeply rooted in firmly held ideological beliefs. As the Brits among you well know, Corbyn has been part of Britain’s labor and trade-union movement since the beginning of his political career.

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again) by Nick Clegg

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, low interest rates, offshore financial centre, sceptred isle, Snapchat, Steve Bannon

Turnout amongst 18–24-year-olds soared in the election on 8th June 2017 to its highest point in a quarter of a century, with more than 60 per cent of that age bracket casting their vote for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.74 It isn’t hard to see why. Tired of Conservative austerity (which has been pursued since the election of 2015 in a far more regressive manner than the approach adopted by the Coalition government) and alarmed by Theresa May’s pitch for a hard Brexit, they sought a change of direction for this country and liked what they saw in Mr Corbyn. Serving up a buffet of something-for-everyone where no one pays the bill, Labour’s manifesto caught the imagination and, it seemed, everyone agreed with Jeremy Corbyn. In the run-up to the 2010 election I briefly experienced being the political flavour of the month.

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This is the party’s official policy-making process, and (in theory at least) all submissions on Brexit will be seen by the members of the International Policy Commission, which includes the Shadow Brexit Secretary and Shadow Foreign Secretary. Throughout his tenure as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn has repeatedly stated that it is the membership that should shape party policy at conference – so start doing it. A one-day pass costs £29, access to the conference hall is £51. Learn the mechanisms and start pushing for policy change. Fourth, keep reminding Jeremy Corbyn why you voted for him. If Labour members and voters were all to put pen to paper and write to the Labour leader with their concerns about Brexit, then Corbyn could hardly complain.

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Recent polling shows that eight out of ten Labour Party members support keeping Britain in the Single Market and the Customs Union – not temporarily, as espoused by the party, but permanently – while more than half would back a referendum on the final deal.75 Crucially, the issue that perhaps animates the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn the most – austerity – is inextricably linked to Brexit. Corbyn refuses to come clean about the crippling contradiction in his own approach: he can try to end austerity by ending Brexit too, but he hasn’t the slightest chance of ending austerity if he refuses to challenge Brexit. Labour’s support for a ‘soft’ Brexit transition, in which Britain temporarily remains inside both the Single Market and the Customs Union, is of little consequence if it is merely succeeded by a hard Brexit.

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval by Jason Cowley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, liberal world order, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, technological determinism, University of East Anglia

If you think of the world your son is growing up in and the world my grandfather grew up in, if you think what he’s going to have and what my father had, I mean, come on! There’s a lot to celebrate. There is absolutely no reason to be pessimistic about the human condition.’ (2016) The Time of the Rebel: Jeremy Corbyn One day in June 2016, as the ‘coup’ to oust Jeremy Corbyn gathered momentum in the immediate aftermath of the vote for Brexit, Owen Smith visited the Labour leader in his office at Portcullis House, Westminster. A vote of no confidence had been tabled against Corbyn and shadow ministers were, at choreographed intervals, resigning in protest at what was perceived to be his failed leadership.

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Cowley is fascinated by the men and women who are creating the history of our era as well as those who document it. He has met and interviewed nearly all the major political players shaping and changing the way we live today. The book features fascinating, wide-ranging explorations of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn, Alex Salmond, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, George Osborne and Theresa May. Cowley is unusual in having access to party leaders and prime ministers on both the left and right. The book also features important surveys of George Orwell, John le Carré, Kazuo Insiguro, and Ian McEwan; biographical portraits of cultural figures; an investigation into the so-called Brexit Murder; and a striking conversation with the political philosopher Michael Sandel.

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The New Statesman – where I have worked as editor since autumn 2008 – began in 1913 as a weekly review of politics and literature. So, it has existed for more than a century – through two world wars – and yet by any measure the present era is remarkable: Trump, Brexit, the Scottish independence referendum, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and the rise of the radical left, the crises in Europe, the rise and fall of Islamic State, a mini world war in Syria, an unprecedented shift in power from the West to the East – these are turbulent and volatile new times. Our world is defined by entrenched wealth inequality, the mass movement of people – including free movement within the European Union – and astounding technological innovation and disruption.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Brexit voters, the vast majority of whom were born before 1965, were likely to hold the kind of ‘authoritarian values’ associated with support for capital punishment, traditional gender hierarchies and tougher treatment of children.1 Conservative Party members, who had the task of electing a new prime minister in summer 2019, were found to be 71 per cent male, 38 per cent over the age of sixty-six, and so obsessed with Brexit that they considered it worth sacrificing economic prosperity, the Union and even the Conservative Party for.2 Among this primarily white, male, ageing section of English society, Islamophobia is simple common sense. At the same time, this period witnessed the unprecedented exposure and recognition of political injustices, further contributing to the demolition of the liberal centre. The shock of Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral surge in the summer of 2017, which deprived May of her parliamentary majority and set the stage for the political gridlock of the following two years, represented an overdue public affirmation that austerity was socially and politically unsustainable. It was followed immediately afterwards by the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire, which offered the most harrowing demonstration of just how unequal individual lives had become.

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The sentiment that society is ‘broken’ and that the guilty go unpunished, which is so eagerly encouraged and exploited by nationalists, received no greater endorsement than during 2008–9. Plenty of lines can be drawn between 2008 and the political upheavals of 2016.7 The financial crisis also played a decisive role in politicising a younger generation on the left, who made an important contribution to Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected electoral surge in 2017.8 The effect of tech platforms on liberal democracies has been feverishly discussed. Following Britain’s 2016 referendum and Trump’s election victory, liberals fixated on the malign power of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Russian ‘troll farms’ and Vladimir Putin to sway election outcomes by planting ‘fake news’ in front of the eyeballs of easily persuaded swing voters.

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The Conservative right is about to discover that, for multinational corporations located in Britain, there is one thing worse than being regulated by Brussels, and that is not being regulated by Brussels. Secondly, there are those uber-elite individuals who still dwell in Blair’s fin de siècle bubble of a single open global society, including Blair himself. Blair has said that he cannot understand the rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.8 Presumably he is even more flummoxed by the Brexit vote, and especially by how it sucked in quasi-Blairites such as Michael Gove. Blair’s myopia has many possible explanations. But one is that people like him do genuinely now inhabit a borderless global space, in which laws, regulations and policies are only ever things to be viewed from above, and never things one is forced into accepting.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016 by Stewart Lee

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Boris Johnson, Bullingdon Club, call centre, centre right, David Attenborough, Etonian, gentrification, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Livingstone, I presume, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, pre–internet, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Fry, trickle-down economics, wage slave, young professional

* * * “… ‘on which some of the songs are co-written by a lesbian’ – My God, a lesbian??? Should they be allowed out in public, or to interact with other people, what next? Gay men on TV? Transgender Olympians?” Alexander Simon “Champagne socialism comes in many vintages.” IvorD Jeremy Corbyn and I are the new Christs Observer, 6 September 2015 Apparently, the Labour Party leadership contest frontrunner, Jeremy Corbyn, wants to dredge the decomposing corpse of Osama bin Laden from the seabed and then marry it. And he wants to live with the dead body of Bin Laden in Islington, as if it were his gay-zombie husband, in a sick left-wing pantomime of the heterosexual Christian wedding ceremony.

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Moir’s article was swiftly withdrawn from the paper’s website, presumably when it became clear that my patented Jan Moir trap, baited with the stinking cheese of assumed outrage, had worked like a dream. But apart from me and Jeremy Corbyn, there was another man, wasn’t there, long long ago, whose wise words were often shorn of context by stupid fools and used against him. And perhaps that man had a beard, and maybe he wore sandals too. And perhaps he too came to lead his lost followers away from false idols towards the promised land. And this lowly man, would he have gone among the people in fine Raja Daswani shirts like Tony Blair? No, he would have dressed like me, in an XXL T-shirt he got free from an indie band; or like Jeremy Corbyn, in a pair of itchy alpaca wool underpants knitted for him by his mother as a gesture of solidarity with the Sandinistas.

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I hope that “new Christs” bit isn’t the attention-grabbing phrase that the Observer elects to pull out of this column. Nobody on Twitter or “Comment Is Free” reads to the end of the pieces they are complaining about. And a headline like “Jeremy Corbyn and I Are the New Christs” will only serve to convince the Conservative content-provider Tim Montgomerie that Guardian newspapers have finally lost the plot, and send Baron Daniel Finkelstein OBE into a tail-chasing tailspin of baronic confusion. What’s the point? But in such moments of despair I think to myself, WWJCD? What would Jeremy Corbyn do? And the sadness just fades away. * * * “‘The ‘new Christs’ bit is in bad taste and the author knows it. Why does he think he is, or even deserves, such a title?

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

mhq5j=e3; http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/greedy-george-osborne-facing-furious-10049285 51 https://www.byline.com/column/67/article/2049 11 Boys’ Own Brexit 1 Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, 26 May 2014. 2 http://www.dulwich.org.uk/college/about/history 3 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/11291050/Nigel-Farage-and-Enoch-Powell-the-full-story-of-Ukips-links-with-the-Rivers-of-Blood-politician.html 4 https://www.channel4.com/news/nigel-farage-ukip-letter-school-concerns-racism-fascism 5 Michael Crick, Channel 4 News, 19 September 2013. 6 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-open-letter-schoolfriend-brexit-poster-nazi-song-dulwich-college-gas-them-all-a7185336.html 7 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-fascist-nazi-song-gas-them-all-ukip-brexit-schoolfriend-dulwich-college-a7185236.html 8 Interview with the author at Dulwich College, 12 January 2018. 9 www.facebook.com/myiannopuolos, accessed 24 January 2018. 10 https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-farage-85b406b2; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farage/11467039/Nigel-Farage-My-public-school-had-a-real-social-mix-but-now-only-the-mega-rich-can-afford-the-fees.html 11 Simon Kupar, Financial Times, 7 July 2016. 12 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/05/project-fear-brexit-predictions-flawed-partisan-new-study-says/; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/25/how-project-fear-failed-to-keep-britain-in-the-eu--and-the-signs/ 13 Odey declined to be interviewed. 14 Sunday Times, 23 April 2017, p. 4; http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-eu-campaign-arron-banks-jeremy-hosking-five-uk-richest-businessmen-peter-hargreaves-a7699046.html 15 https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/cambridge-analytica-facebook-data-protection/ 16 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43581892 17 https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/cambridge-analytica-facebook-data-protection/ 18 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analytica-leave-eu/what-are-the-links-between-cambridge-analytica-and-a-brexit-campaign-group-idUSKBN1GX2IO 19 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/24/aggregateiq-data-firm-link-raises-leave-group-questions https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/government-economy/brexit-campaigners-breached-uk-vote-rules-lawyers-say 20 https://dominiccummings.com/2016/10/29/on-the-referendum-20-the-campaign-physics-and-data-science-vote-leaves-voter-intention-collection-system-vics-now-available-for-all/ 21 A Very British Coup, BBC2, 22 Sepptember 2016. 22 http://www.standard.co.uk/business/business-focus-the-billionaire-hedge-fund-winners-who-braved-the-brexit-rollercoaster-a3284101.html 23 http://fortune.com/2014/12/03/heineken-charlene-de-carvalho-self-made-heiress/ 24 http://www.cityam.com/262239/david-camerons-ex-adviser-daniel-korski-launches-major 25 Tim Shipman, All Out War: Brexit and the Sinking of Britain’s Political Class (London: William Collins, 2017), p. 610. 12 For the Few, Not the Many 1 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/11818744/Jeremy-Corbyn-the-boy-to-the-manor-born.html 2 http://www.castlehouseschool.co.uk/about-the-school/fees/ 3 Rosa Prince, Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup (London: Biteback Publishing, 2017), p. 29. Castle House is a leading institution among the private school movement. Its former headmaster, Richard Walden, is former chairman of the Independent Schools Association. 4 In the 1960s it was still being run as a voluntary aided school which received state and private fee funding.

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The central tenet of Winchester’s own charter proclaimed the rights of ‘the many poor scholars engaged in scholastic disciplines, who suffering from deficiency, penury and indigence, lack and will lack in the future the proper means for continuing and advancing in the aforesaid art of grammar’.11 Winchester’s system of professional schooling secured such strong ecclesiastical and academic results that many of Oxford’s brightest scholars were drawn from its ranks. Today Winchester College continues in this tradition of enrolling bright and influential students. Two of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest advisers, Seumas Milne and James Schneider, are Wykehamists who went on to Oxford. The success at Winchester spurred on other medieval philanthropists. Education was suddenly the new charity of choice for independently minded movers and shakers of the medieval period. The establishment of the first public schools gathered pace with Eton (1440), St Paul’s (1509) and Westminster (1560).

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Indeed, despite the low number of privately educated ministers in the 1945 cabinet, Attlee’s government soon returned to the Old School Tie order. Attlee had been educated at Northaw School, a boys’ preparatory school near Pluckley in Kent, and then Haileybury College, a public school in Hertfordshire (and alma mater of Rudyard Kipling, Group Captain Peter Townsend, Quentin Letts, Stephen Mangan, Dom Joly and key aide to Jeremy Corbyn, Barry Gardiner MP. It was while working at Haileybury House, a charity run by his old school to help East End children, that he underwent his conversion to socialism. The shock of how desperate and pathetic life was for so many ordinary people living in London convinced him that the state must be used to help redistribute the nation’s wealth.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

, The Independent, 17 July, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/brexit-latest-news-owen-paterson-eu-single-market-access-pay-tariff-barriers-trade-goods-services-a7845776.html 36 Espinoza, J. (2016) ‘Nigerian officials have made plans to travel to Britain to collect a controversial bronze statue’, Daily Telegraph, 9 March, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/12189194/Nigerian-officials-have-made-plans-to-travel-to-Britain-to-collect-a-controversial-bronze-statue.html 37 Hope, C. (2018) ‘Jeremy Corbyn says schools should teach children about the “grave injustices” of the British empire’, Daily Telegraph, 11 October, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/10/10/jeremy-corbyn-says-schools-should-teach-children-grave-injustices/ 38 Winder, R. (2013) Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain, London: Abacus. 39 Brennan, Z. (2002) ‘What are the Patten girls up to?’, London Evening Standard, 7 August, https://www.standard.co.uk/news/what-are-the-patten-girls-up-to-6302164.html 40 Stembridge, J.

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., Smith, M. and Bartlett, N. (2018) ‘Immigration cap on doctors and nurses to be axed IMMEDIATELY in humiliating U-turn for Theresa May’, Daily Mirror, 18 June, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/immigration-cap-doctors-nurses-axed-12704643 55 Cowburn, A. (2018) ‘Jeremy Corbyn to say there is “mounting evidence austerity is killing people”’, The Independent, 1 July, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-mounting-evidence-austerity-is-killing-people-government-cuts-labour-welfare-a8424381.html 56 BBC (2018) ‘NHS plan in case of no-deal Brexit, Simon Stevens says’, BBC News, 1 July, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44672873 57 Which former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has recently hinted he has doubts about.

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In 1927, the biologist Raymond Pearl, one of the earliest critics of the eugenic movement, wrote that: ‘I frankly do not see the usually alleged cause for eugenic alarm, for the reason that history demonstrates, I believe, that the superior people of the world have always been recruited from the masses, intellectually speaking, in far greater numbers than they have been reproduced by the upper classes’.79 As the geneticist Eric Turkheimer has pointed out, if ‘all other sources of variation between people are accounted for then everything is heritable’.80 But of course other sources of variation have huge impact and so we are left with very little that is heritable, and what is inherited is the result of the random mixing of two sets of genes producing a pretty random outcome. In fact, it is an almost completely random outcome.81 What matters most to the vast majority of people is how they are treated after they are born (and also during their development in the womb), not their particular genetic makeup. For instance, his genes may have possibly made Jeremy Corbyn an unusually kind man, one not predisposed to be greedy, but it was events around him that propelled him to become leader of the Labour Party, not his innate ability. Corbyn is not an especially gifted public speaker; he was not born with a trait for great charisma, or an innate flair for getting others to trust him when perhaps they shouldn’t.

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019 by Stewart Lee

Airbnb, AltaVista, anti-communist, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Ford Model T, imposter syndrome, Jeremy Corbyn, New Journalism, off-the-grid, Overton Window, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, white flight

She agreed that when Nigel Farage, earlier that week, had threatened to unleash a pussy-grabbing Trump sex-attack robot on Theresa May, it had been a bit much.5 Suzanne Evans from the Ukips was wearing a giant Remembrance Day poppy made of cloth. Jeremy Corbyn came on TV wearing a tiny badge of a poppy. I said, ‘Your poppy’s massive, isn’t it, Suzanne? Jeremy Corbyn’s is tiny. He’s a traitor, isn’t he?’ Suzanne Evans from the Ukips didn’t say much, and I worried that she had my card marked for being one of the liberal comedians that dominate all comedy now, to little or no effect in real terms. Perhaps she thought I was trying to generate material for a funny column.

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It is appropriate to describe Boris Johnson with pure witless swearing, for that is all he deserves. He is of a political class where any insult, no matter how vicious, is acceptable, if it is delivered with the rhetorical flourishes and classical allusions of the public-school debating society. Hence, Cameron can scornfully sneer at Jeremy Corbyn and describe Dennis Skinner as a dinosaur, yet the venerable beast himself is dismissed from the house when he calls Cameron merely ‘dodgy’. The problem for the pro-Europe voter currently is that while obviously despising Cameron as both a person and a politician, one nonetheless wants him to prevail over Johnson, Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and the Brexit camp.

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Consider, for example, this convincingly odd submission from General Dreedle: ‘Russia is very well doing without your Opra Winfrey western pornography and youre decadent music. More lies about Ukraine which was only the size of a biscuit before transsexual won.’ Whether the supposed Observer contributor General Dreedle is real or not, the fact is Putin’s Russia has taken political propaganda to the next level, motherfuckers! Meanwhile, here at home, Jeremy Corbyn is filmed sitting on the floor of a train. There is a long tradition of essentially dishonest photo opportunities being used by politicians to cement policy in the public mind. Consider Margaret Thatcher in that tank in 1986; or Michael Dukakis in that tank in 1988; or John Major on that tank in 1991.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

In Spain and Portugal left-wing parties appeared from nowhere and shook up the political landscape. In the UK general election in 2015 the SNP (Scottish National Party) won virtually every seat in Scotland, nearly wiping out the once-dominant Labour Party. And in its leadership contest in 2015 the UK’s Labour Party elected the left-wing rebel, Jeremy Corbyn, to be its new leader. The veteran Corbyn won a landslide. In the same year Marine Le Pen’s Front National made huge gains in local elections, coming first in six of France’s thirteen regions. In 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union, against the advice of the prime minister, all living former prime ministers, the leader of the Opposition and President Obama.

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Even in northern Europe, once a model for vibrant self-confident social democracy, there are right-wing parties that worry the mainstream. The left-wing outsiders are part of the pattern, too, although they struggle to make up much of the fabric. Syriza rules in Greece, and the Left Bloc is part of a coalition in Portugal. Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the UK’s Labour Party – a left-wing rebel when Tony Blair was its determinedly centrist and timidly expedient leader. In Spain charismatic left-wing leaders, hailed like rock stars, move erratically a little closer to government and then further away again. Support for once-mighty mainstream parties is fracturing and they are becoming less coherent.

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Quite often, in their radical distinctiveness, they bring the cautious mainstream left to a semblance of political life. Hillary Clinton might have lost the US presidential campaign more decisively, if Bernie Sanders had not forced her to become a little more daring. And the UK’s Labour Party risked dying of boredom, before Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy in 2015 brought a soporific leadership contest to life. In Greece and Spain mainstream left parties were languishing, before movements to the left of them forced a rethink of sorts. While they spark distinctively, the left-wing outsiders have one significant connection with the right-wing alternative: not only do they speak of the levers they will pull to transform the lives of voters, but they imply a power to act unilaterally that does not exist any more.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman

affirmative action, Boris Johnson, crowdsourcing, deskilling, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, old-boy network, Russell Brand

The Hansard Society, which studies Parliament in detail, found that only 21 per cent of MPs’ time is spent in the Chamber, with constituency casework taking up the most time (28 per cent), followed by constituency meetings and events (21 per cent).3 What the hell am I doing? An MP can choose what policy issues they focus on, and what sort of politician they want to be too. When I interviewed a charmingly eccentric Labour backbencher called Jeremy Corbyn in 2011, he told me, while wearing a curious pea-green sweatshirt from his local community centre, that all he cared about was his constituency work. Other MPs see themselves as campaigners, coming into Parliament to ensure that very specific injustices are corrected. But an experience common to all MPs when they arrive is disorientation about how on earth to go about doing what they want to do; and for many, that confusion extends to what exactly it is that they want to do too.

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When Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell, who was often considered too old to do the job, stood up in 2006 to ask a question about pensions, Tory MP Eric Forth shouted loudly, ‘Declare your interest!’ Responding to David Cameron’s statement on his renegotiation with European leaders of Britain’s relationship with the EU in February 2016, Jeremy Corbyn started talking about meetings he himself had been holding: ‘Last week – like him – I was in Brussels, meeting with heads of government and leaders of European socialist parties, one of whom said to me . . .’ As Corbyn very briefly caught his breath, Tory backbencher Chris Pincher shouted into the silence, ‘WHO ARE YOU?’

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The most interesting response was that 23 per cent of people claimed it had put them off politics – even though they were already sufficiently engaged to turn the TV on to watch the session in the first place. Voters’ attitudes had largely hardened since the previous poll, in 2015, just after Jeremy Corbyn had tried to change the culture of PMQs by crowd-sourcing all his questions to members of the public (a practice that fizzled out). In that poll,12 conducted for the Hansard Society, a greater proportion of voters had either seen the whole session or watched clips on the news (47 per cent in total), and 46 per cent felt there was too much political point-scoring.

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles by Fintan O'Toole

airport security, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, deindustrialization, deliberate practice, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Etonian, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, full employment, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, l'esprit de l'escalier, labour mobility, late capitalism, open borders, rewilding, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, technoutopianism, zero-sum game

But the party has no chance at all of winning a majority and it could well suffer catastrophic losses in its own traditional heartlands. A large part of this failure can be named in advance: Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn is relentlessly vilified by the Tory press and there is no doubt that this is a huge factor in the election. But talk to anyone on the ground in those crucial areas of the Midlands and the North, including those who want Labour to win, and they will tell you that traditional Labour voters are, as perhaps the best journalistic diviner of the popular mood in Britain, John Harris, puts it, ‘bitterly dismissive of Jeremy Corbyn’. Polling bears this out. Corbyn is regarded favourably in YouGov’s large-scale surveys by 21 per cent of voters and unfavourably by 61 per cent.

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They have to imply the opposite of what they used to suggest – not that Ireland is enclosed but that it is open; not that we have a monolithic religious and ethnic identity but that we are enthusiastically pluralist; not that we look inwards but that we look outwards; not that we think we can revert to a nineteenth-century nationalism but that we assert our national independence through solidarity and co-operation; not that we are in thrall to dreams but that we understand our own and the world’s realities. It is as absurd as it is sad that we’ve reached a point where these qualities would make Ireland so radically unEnglish. 6 June 2017 The British election – or at least the English election – is saturated with nostalgia. Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are appealing to notions of how things used to be. Corbyn has had a better election than May because his version of the past has more reality, and more nobility, than hers. The centrality of nostalgia is not hard to understand. General elections are usually about the short- to medium-term future: here’s what we say we will do in the next four or five years.

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A constitution based on crude majoritarianism and fascistic denunciations of ‘saboteurs’ and ‘enemies of the people’ is not a recipe for stability. Both of these impulses have been firmly rejected. The British looked at the prospect of a virtual Tory one-party state and recoiled from it. And the hysterical smearing of Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour allies by the Mail and the rest of the Tory press failed. Corbyn, the ‘unelectable’, terrorist-loving loony, garnered more votes for Labour than Tony Blair did in two of his three election victories. The idea that Labour can be a force only if it abandons its social-democratic roots has been overturned.

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

The formation has used the political software NationBuilder to gather supporters and has developed its own dedicated platform to make decisions on policies and strategy and has resorted to social media, YouTube videos and even video games as propaganda tools. A similar spirit of organisational innovation has been displayed by Momentum, a left-wing political organisation that was initially founded by Jon Lansman, Adam Klug, Emma Rees and James Schneider after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in the autumn of 2015. It self-describes as an organisation that wants to ‘build on the energy and enthusiasm from the Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Leader campaign, to increase participatory democracy, solidarity, and grassroots power and help Labour become the transformative governing party of the 21st century’.7 Momentum has been widely applauded for its effective use of social media, and has recently established My Momentum, an online platform that allows members to participate in discussions and make decisions.

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This tendency is also seen beyond digital parties proper, and in particular in post-crash left formations and candidates that have in fact also experienced a spectacular growth in the young vote. In the 2017 French presidential elections, Jean Luc Mélenchon was by far the most popular candidate among young people, with 30 per cent of those between ages 18 and 24 turning to him. Jeremy Corbyn’s impressive performance in the 2017 UK general elections was propelled by an avalanche of youth vote. In a post-election survey conducted by YouGov,113 it was found that Labour share of votes was inversely proportional to voters’ age. Labour scored 66 per cent among those ages 18–19; it only had 19 per cent of support among those aged over 70.

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Similar measures have been adopted by Podemos, which has a salary restitution programme called Impulsa financing social and community projects, and which publishes all its budgetary information on the party’s website. Many of these demands and policies that are part of the ‘digital freedoms’ platform have by now transcended the confines of digital parties. This is seen in governmental initiatives such as the Digital Bill of Rights proposed in the United Kingdom by Jeremy Corbyn or Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights (Marco Civil da Internet) which propose to update rights and freedoms to the digital condition. It may thus be said that whereas the early defining issue of digital parties – digital rights – has been progressively absorbed by mainstream politics, digital parties, including the Pirate Parties that were most strongly single-issue in their original design, have progressively come to encompass a greater variety of issues, starting from the question of updating democracy to the digital condition.

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To) by Chris Grey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, game design, global pandemic, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, lockdown, non-tariff barriers, open borders, post-truth, reserve currency, Robert Mercer

In any case, even had there been an argument for a parliamentary vote to accept or reject the referendum result, there was no political pressure for one (I am not referring here to the different issue of a vote on triggering Article 50, which is discussed in the next chapter). Such pressure would have required, at a minimum, a demand from Labour, the official opposition party. Not only did this not come, but Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader, far from seeking a parliamentary vote on the referendum result, had on the day after the result called for the government to immediately issue an Article 50 notification so as to commence exit proceedings (though a few weeks later he claimed to have been misunderstood).11 Labour and Brexit The story of Brexit is to some large extent the story of the internal politics of the Tory Party, but in the post-referendum years the role of Labour under Corbyn was also important.

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That this happened was a truly shameful dereliction of duty on the part of those many MPs who believed that Brexit would be deeply damaging to Britain but still voted to enact it. It arose at least in part because of the hysterical mood that the Mail’s headline had both expressed and exacerbated. The size of the majority also reflected Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to impose a three-line whip on Labour MPs to support the government. One important consequence of this vote was that just as it strengthened May’s hand, conversely, it meant that all those MPs who voted for it, and the Labour leadership, were complicit in the consequences. Indeed, as events progressed they were frequently taunted, by the very Brexiters who had been so adamantly opposed to a vote, for having agreed to Brexit and, supposedly, for having endorsed whatever outcome the Article 50 process might have, including that of there being no agreement on withdrawal terms (i.e.

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But it had been gifted to Brexiters by Labour’s electoral stance, just as Labour support for triggering Article 50 had also been a gift to Brexiters. Yet perhaps it contained a glimmer of truth as regards how MPs might vote, since when Labour MP Chuka Umunna tabled an amendment to the Queen’s Speech to the new parliament, calling for continued single market membership, Jeremy Corbyn ordered his MPs to abstain and sacked those Labour frontbenchers who supported it. It was one of many ways in which Corbyn acted as the Brexiters’ enabler, as demonstrated by Nigel Farage’s endorsement of his actions for ‘showing his true Brexit colours’.63 THE ROW OF THE SUMMER Though some of the events just mentioned came a few days later, it was against this general background that the Article 50 talks belatedly started in the middle of June 2017.

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

The Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party is very right-wing on issues like gay and women’s rights or climate change but its voters base is in Northern Ireland’s farming community which depends on there being no border or customs clearing between Northern Ireland in the UK and Ireland in the EU. Jeremy Corbyn, the leftist Labour leader, has saved his honour and his focus on domestic issues like austerity, cuts to public services like health care and the police found an echo especially among young voters. Mrs May and the pro-Brexit press in Britain tried to portray Corbyn as a friend of terrorists, a leftwing extremist living in an imagined left-wing 1970s past.

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It sounded and looked like the elite establishment of globalisation’s chattering class. It might have been helped if the opposition parties had commanding leaders. After Paddy Ashdown, Charles Kennedy and Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems were led by an affable but little-known MP. Labour was far worse. It had elected as leader Jeremy Corbyn, a leftist from the 1970s who had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since that era. He was not pro-Brexit but equally had never shown any enthusiasm for the EU. He wanted a socialist Europe in which trade unions were strong, while open market trading arrangements and enforced competition rules were suspect.

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The New Statesman could find seven pages to profile in gushing prose the anti-immigrant Dutch politician Geert Wilders as the coming man in Europe shortly before Wilders was soundly beaten in the Dutch election of March 2017, but the paper regularly over many years turned down articles that were positive about Europe and EU membership. To blame the inability of Jeremy Corbyn to make a pro-EU case for the Leave victory is ahistorical. It was the result of the long Labour years of 1997–2010 when Labour, the liberal-left intelligentsia and the media lost both voice and a coherent message on Europe. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown invested any of their leadership and communication skills in explaining the benefits of the EU to the nation.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

Ralph Miliband, “The New Revisionism in Britain,” New Left Review (March/April 1985); Stuart Hall, “Faith, Hope or Clarity,” Marxism Today (January 1985): 16. 26. Patrick Wintour and Sarah Hall, “Labour Membership Halved,” Guardian, August 3, 2004, theguardian.com/politics/2004/aug/03/uk.labour. 27. Robin Blackburn, “From Ed Miliband to Jeremy Corbyn,” Jacobin, November 12, 2015, jacobinmag.com/2015/11/from-ed-miliband-to-jeremy-corbyn. 28. Sanchez Manning, “Take Me Out? No, Jeremy Liked a Night in Eating Cold Beans with His Cat Called Harold Wilson, Corbyn’s First Wife Reveals,” Daily Mail, August 15, 2015. Chapter Nine: How We Win 1. Sam Gindin, “Building a Mass Socialist Party,” Jacobin, December 20, 2016, jacobinmag.com/2016/12/socialist-party-bernie-sanders-labor-capitalism. 2.

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But while not rejecting all forms of technocratic expertise, the democratic socialist knows that it will take mass struggle from below and messy disruptions to bring about a more durable and radical sort of change. In the second part of this book, I discuss the world today and why there are new opportunities for this better sort of socialism to take root. As we’ll see, Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn and the United States’ Bernie Sanders have pursued a “class struggle” social democracy, unleashing popular energy that has revitalized the Left as a whole. I offer a tentative strategy for taking advantage of this unexpected second chance and explain why the working class can still be an agent of social transformation.

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Democracy prevents capitalism from returning to its “war against all” worst. But for those still aspiring to an age of abundance and solidarity, defending existing victories or negotiating terms of defeat isn’t enough. As we will see, the emergence of the movement around British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and to a lesser extent that of Bernie Sanders in the United States, represents a surprising challenge to the Third Way. What makes Corbyn, in particular, so remarkable is that he doesn’t just offer a return to twentieth-century Labourism but rather wants a new “class struggle social democracy” in which the party meeting, union hall, and electoral rally are far from the only acceptable places to practice politics.

Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline by Steven K. Kapp

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, book value, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, demand response, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, epigenetics, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Internet Archive, Jeremy Corbyn, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, slashdot, theory of mind, twin studies, universal basic income, Wayback Machine

In September of 2015, there had been a shuffle in leadership in the political parties and suddenly many in the ND groups were talking about wanting to reach out to one person. That person was Jeremy Corbyn Member of Parliament (MP), the newly elected Leader of the Labour Party (then and at the time of writing in early 2019, the main opposition party in the UK). In the autumn of 2015 individuals from all the ND groups were talking about how Corbyn seemed different, how if anyone was going to understand our plight it would be him. This intrigued me as it was coming from people who claimed to have lost faith in our political system, from supporters of other political parties as well as from Labour supporters. Jeremy Corbyn seemed to be appealing to many within the different ND communities, because he seemed to be approaching politics differently, so I addressed an open letter to him.

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In the open letter I spoke about the emergence of an online-based neurodivergent community and stated that: Although we are isolated within our geographical communities we have found others like us and formed huge communities on the internet. We gain support from each other and find ways to overcome hurdles together. [4] 19 Changing Paradigms: The Emergence … 267 I congratulated Jeremy Corbyn for his appointment of a Shadow Minister for Mental Health and asked: Jeremy Corbyn, you have created a Minister for Mental Health and I applaud you for that, it truly is an immensely important post in this era. Can we ask that you also consider appointing a Minister for NeuroDiversity to work closely with the Minister for Mental Health?

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The open letter received hundreds of comments in support in every ND group I shared it in. The ND community then seemed to take ownership of it and started sharing and retweeting it to their own contacts. It wasn’t long before the letter had gone viral. I wanted as many comments as possible from members of the different neurodivergent communities before sending it to Jeremy Corbyn MP. It was essential to me that he sees it was the community speaking and not just me. Between publishing the letter, coming out that I was autistic, my own general incompetence at promoting my paid work, the exploitative nature of the autism world, and my focus having turned to campaigning, I had not been able to make a success of my business.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Libertarian populists combine support for socially liberal policies with a sweeping critique of the failure of mainstream parties to address corporate greed, economic inequalities, global capitalism, and social injustice. Campaigning as outsiders, this appeal is likely to mobilize Labour Party members favoring Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders supporters in Democratic primaries, voters for Jean-­Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the Five Star Movement in Rome, and community activists engaged in Pablo Iglesias’ Podemos in Spain.28 Political parties usually attract older voters, but by adopting digital tools, some like the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, have succeeded in attracting a relatively young membership.29 At the same time, levels of youthful enthusiasm are rarely translated into equivalent levels of voting turnout at the ballot box.30 The Millennial generation in the US and Europe are more likely than their elders to participate in direct protest politics, community volunteering, new social 44 The Cultural Backlash Theory movements, and online activism, but they are usually far less engaged through conventional electoral channels such as voting.31 Libertarian-­ Populist parties seeking the support of younger, college-­educated voters therefore face stiff competition from social movements championing the progressive agenda on issues such as environmental protection and climate change, LGBTQ rights, gender equality, Black Lives Matter, the ‘Me-­too’ movement against sexual harassment, gun control, immigration rights, human rights and democracy, international development, and social justice.

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This combination is particularly common in Latin America.7 Thus, Chavez railed against ‘predatory’ political elites, economic austerity measures, and the neo-­ colonial foreign policies of the United States, while inspiring a socialist revolution in Venezuela.8 Studies comparing the Americas, Central and Eastern Europe, and Asia have identified many populist parties and leaders that favor state economic management, wealth redistribution, and social justice, policies which can be classified as part of the ‘populist left.’9 Similarly, there are several left-­ wing populist parties in Western Europe, including Podemos in Spain and the Five-­Star Movement in Italy. It has also become fairly common for left-­wing parties and politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders to use populist rhetoric when criticizing financial elites and the power of multinational corporations and big business. The discourse of radical left parties in Europe, traditionally communist and socialist, have been found to have become more populist in recent years, making broad claims about ‘the good people’ not just appealing to the working class.10 Part III From Values to Votes 219 In the United States, as well, populism is associated historically with the left.

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But in practice, party labels can disguise deep ideological divisions, such as those between neo-­classical laissez faire liberals and social liberals. Moreover, identical party labels have been adopted by parties with very different platforms and ideologies. The same name can also mask major ideological shifts over time within a party, such as the British Labour Party experienced under the leadership of Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn. Similarly, Trump mounted a hostile take-­over of the GOP, so that the policies of the party under his leadership diverged sharply from the Republican Party of George W. Bush, such as the contrasts between the international promotion of democracy in the Middle East by the Neo-­Cons and the ‘American First’ withdrawal from this role in Rex Tillerson’s State Department.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

In a 2015 report into why the Labour Party lost the general election that year, Jon Cruddas suggested the party was now really only appealing to those who are at home in ‘metropolitan modernity’, who ‘value openness, creativity, self-fulfilment and self-determination’. ‘Public opinion in the European Union’, Eurobarometer 83. 50. Jonathan Walker, ‘Jeremy Corbyn joins opposition to Pegida-UK’s Birmingham march’, Birmingham Mail, 4 February 2016, http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/jeremy-corbyn-joins-opposition-pegida-10835496. 51. Hilary Pilkington, Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League (Manchester University Press, 2016); also see the excellent work from the academic Joel Busher, who spent sixteen months with the EDL, Joel Busher, ‘Understanding the English Defence League’, London School of Economics and Political Science blog, 2 December 2015, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/understanding-the-english-defence-league-life-on-the-front-line-of-an-imagined-clash-of-civilisations/. 52.

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As a result, billionaire right-wing politicians with economic policies that won’t help them, like Donald Trump, can attract millions of working-class voters who feel forgotten with the right language and identity-based promises. That a billionaire has been able to successfully position himself as a man of the people should shame liberals. It’s an indictment of their stunning failure. Left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn joined the anti-Pegida-UK demonstration on 6 February, marching under the banner ‘We Chose Hope.’ He was joined by local Labour MP Liam Byrne who said ‘We don’t want our [community] threatened by racists.’50 Jess Phillips MP called Tommy’s plans a ‘costly hate rally’. Racists. Idiots. Not a frustrated group of people who find, in the flag-waving and chanting, some reclamation of power in a system that ignores them.

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.* Following their workshop they sat on the steps in front of the building, smoking roll-up cigarettes and practising their latest song, ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ with repurposed anti-fracking lyrics: In this world where we live There should be re-new-a-bles Bring me sunshine Bring me tidal Bring me lo-ve! A fresh-faced Momentum organiser suddenly burst out of the building and ushered us all inside the main hall for a surprise announcement. This turned out to be by Jeremy Corbyn, who the day before had been re-elected as leader of the Labour Party. After his speech—in which he spoke about the unpopular but ultimately vindicated struggle of the activist—one of the Nanas, Amy, snuck past Corbyn’s security team and into his car as he was putting on his seat belt. ‘Can I give you this from the Lancashire Nanas?’

Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, falling living standards, G4S, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megacity, moral panic, open borders, open immigration, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, W. E. B. Du Bois, Winter of Discontent, working poor

Conservative Party, Forward, Together: Our Plan for a Stronger Britain and a Prosperous Future, London: Conservative Party, p. 54. 7. Labour Party, For the Many Not the Few: The Labour Party Manifesto 2017, London: Labour Party, 2017, p. 28. 8. ‘Jeremy Corbyn: I’ve Not Changed my Mind on Immigration’, BBC News, 10 January 2017. 9. Helen Lewis, ‘Jeremy Corbyn: “Wholesale” EU Immigration Has Destroyed Conditions for British Workers’, New Statesman, 23 July 2017. 10. Mehreen Khan, ‘Posted Worker Problems’, Financial Times, 24 October 2017. 11. Gareth Dale, ‘Leaving the Fortresses: Between Class Internationalism and Nativist Social Democracy’, Viewpoint Magazine, 30 November 2017. 12.

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Then Labour leader Ed Miliband attacked the government for failing to meet their net migration target, the party abstained on the 2014 Immigration Bill, effectively waiving it through; and they went into the 2015 Election selling Labour Party mugs that promised they would put ‘Controls on Immigration’. But there was some Parliamentary resistance. Sixteen MPs voted against the 2014 bill, six of them from Labour, including three of the people who would go on to lead the party a year later: Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell. When an inter-ministerial ‘Hostile Environment Group’ was set up so government departments could coordinate their efforts to make migrants’ lives more difficult, then Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather, together with some of her colleagues, tried to make its existence and its name public knowledge through a Freedom of Information request.

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In the process, they’ve encouraged and cleared the way for politicians who have already indulged in racism and xenophobia to follow them, if not right to the edge of this anti-migrant cliff, then close enough. Conversely, there’s a dearth of voices with a sizeable platform from which to counter the prevailing discourse. Until Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, the only significant players who were even arguing that immigration is not an issue were the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Greens, relatively small parties and new to the subject. This was the context of the EU referendum, whereby even though people like Corbyn refused to give in to anti-migrant messaging, there were far fewer voices defending migrants than there were politicians clamouring over one another to attack them.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

., Historiography, Oxford University Press, 1999 Wintle, Claire, Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Berghahn Books, 2013 Woerkens, Martine van, The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India, University of Chicago Press, 2002 Wolfe, Patrick, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, Verso, 2015 Wolmar, Christian, Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India, Atlantic Books, 2018 Wood, James, ‘These Etonians’, London Review of Books 2019, 41:13, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/james-wood/diary Woolcock, Nicola, ‘To say grammar schools are full of rich white pupils is lazy and wrong, says Townley Grammar head teacher’, The Times, 7/12/2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/to-say-grammar-schools-are-full-of-rich-white-pupils-is-lazy-and-wrong-says-townley-grammar-head-teacher-jr6f7djrm ‘The World’s Top Travelling Nations’, GetGoingInsurance, 2020, https://getgoinginsurance.co.uk/big-travel-spenders/ Yanni, Carla, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display, Athlone, 1999 Yeo, Colin, Welcome to Britain: Fixing our Broken Immigration System, Biteback, 2020 Yorke, Harry, ‘Jeremy Corbyn promises children will be taught about evils of British Empire’, Telegraph, 25/11/2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/11/25/jeremy-corbyn-promises-children-will-taught-evils-british-empire/ Young, Robert J. C., Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Wiley-Blackwell, 2001 Young, Toby, ‘Britain needs Boris, the extraordinary man I’ve known for 35 years’, Spectator, 11/04/2020, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/britain-needs-boris-the-extraordinary-man-ive-known-for-35-years Younge, Gary, ‘Ambalavaner Sivanandan obituary’, Guardian, 7/02/2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/07/ambalavaner-sivanandan Yule, Henry, and Burnell, A.

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In the meantime, local relationships were shaped by other and different influences.’ 10 Tony Little, ‘Remember the Rights of the Savage’, Liberal History, 20/05/2012, https://liberalhistory.org.uk/history/remember-the-rights-of-the-savage/. 11 Harry Yorke, ‘Jeremy Corbyn promises children will be taught about evils of British Empire’, Telegraph, 25/11/2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/11/25/jeremy-corbyn-promises-children-will-taught-evils-british-empire/. 12 Andy Brown, Political Languages of Race and the Politics of Exclusion, Ashgate, 1999; Robert Saunders, Yes to Europe!, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 267. 13 MacKenzie proceeds, on p. 179 of Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960, Manchester University Press, 1984, to quote the German G.

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Or to put it another way, empire is yet another of those topics, alongside trans rights, Brexit, the merits of Dyson vacuum cleaners over Henrys, that has become a locum of tension in the culture wars. You can’t explore the issue casually, or express curiosity, or admit ignorance: you need to take sides. It extends even to party politics, with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announcing in the run-up to a general election that under his party children would be taught about the ‘historical injustice’ and ‘colonialism’ as part of the national curriculum,11 while Michael Gove announced early in his tenure as Secretary of State for Education that history lessons in schools needed to ‘celebrate’ the legacy of the British empire.

The Lost Decade: 2010–2020, and What Lies Ahead for Britain by Polly Toynbee, David Walker

banking crisis, battle of ideas, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, call centre, car-free, centre right, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, energy transition, Etonian, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Large Hadron Collider, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, moral panic, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, pension reform, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, smart meter, Uber for X, ultra-processed food, urban renewal, working-age population

Had Labour won there would have been no referendum on Europe. Part of the story after 2010 was Labour’s ineffectiveness as the principal opposition party at Westminster, and in Scotland, the SNP becoming what the Tories had forever been in England: the natural party of government. Labour lost in 2015 and made only marginal gains in 2017, followed by Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to seize the initiative during the national crisis over Brexit. Writers scratched national itches but were curiously out of the loop. In All Together Now? Mike Carter tramped the land, angry at what England now was but also upset with himself for letting ‘it’ happen. Blame the anti-collective turn, the politicians who pushed it (and the people who voted them in) – or should that be the amorphous forces of globalisation and finance capitalism?

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That did not stop Cameron practising government by school chum. His resignation honours list was ‘so full of cronies it would embarrass a medieval court’, said Tim Farron. Jeremy Hunt, head boy of Charterhouse, slugged it out with Bullingdon Johnson to lead the party. It wasn’t just the Tories. Jeremy Corbyn attended the kind of prep school where, as a former pupil put it, a boy could be flogged for ‘having your cap at a rakish angle’; Momentum media strategist James Schneider was privately educated, as were Labour apparatchiks Seumas Milne and Jon Lansman. Author Robert Verkaik said these schools produced inflated egos with ‘an innate sense of entitlement and … an almost pathological willingness to risk everything’, which explained much in recent politics.

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Joining enjoyed a fair measure of popular assent in 1972, which was formalised in 1975, when Margaret Thatcher wore that fetching Euro-jumper. Harold Wilson’s use of the referendum device created the bad precedent of taking decisions of national import away from parliament. He had used it as a way of dealing with his recalcitrants, especially Jeremy Corbyn’s mentor Tony Benn. Labour subsequently warmed to membership, while the Tories became sceptical, though not until after Thatcher enthusiastically endorsed the principle of a single market in goods and capital flows (and people). UK membership was never wholehearted; the practice and institutions of the union interested few minds and touched fewer hearts.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

That is not to dismiss the often heroic work of many public sector workers, but if there was ever a case of lions led by donkeys this was it. WEEKS LOST, LIVES LOST The lack of urgency was criminal. One of the many ways in which Sir Keir Starmer, the Labor Party’s new leader, has distinguished himself from Jeremy Corbyn has been to ask Boris Johnson different versions of the same blunderbuss question: why was he so slow? The same question could be put to many leaders across the West. By the end of February, two things were clear to any Western government that wasn’t asleep at the wheel. The first was that the virus had left China and was “going global” (a phrase that The Economist put on its cover on February 27).

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It may also allow some populists in democracies to grab some unjustified powers. But it will not convince the people of the West to give up on elections. The bigger question is what will those people now vote for—and we fear the answer is larger, more nationalist governments. THE EVEN GREATER SOCIETY The Coronavirus arrived just as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, the two most left-wing people in the Anglosphere’s recent history, were bowing off the political stage. Having seen their ideas comprehensively rejected by voters in Britain’s general election and the Democratic primaries, and knowing their parties had chosen pragmatic leaders, you might have imagined the old firebrands would be a bit downcast, even humbled.

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“Even someone like me, the most conservative and fiscally conscious senator in the country, is willing to spend federal dollars to help millions of workers,” announced Rand Paul, the libertarian champion in the Senate. For the populist wing of the right, there has been something close to enthusiasm. Johnson’s Conservatives won the British election in 2019 on a platform of spending more on just about everything (just less than Jeremy Corbyn). At the end of June, Johnson delivered a speech comparing himself to FDR in his desire to “build, build, build.” In America Trumpism rejected decades’ worth of Republican orthodoxy on free trade and small government. Steve Bannon, the mastermind of Trump’s election victory, has long thought limited-government conservatism is old hat.16 For him the idea that you can remain dependent on China for vital goods like medical supplies while pushing back against that country’s geo-strategic ambitions is absurd.

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

Of course, the public has its suspicions, but the public always has its suspicions. The drama of democratic life absorbs the evidence without anyone being any the wiser. Freedland’s novel is closer to home for now because the election of a President Rightist came to pass. Mullin was a would-be Labour MP on the left of the party in the 1980s and an ally of the young Jeremy Corbyn. It is unlikely that Mullin ever imagined Corbyn would be the person who might put his fiction to the test. Both men were acolytes of Tony Benn, who was for many years the British left’s best hope. Benn never came that close to becoming prime minister. As I write, the prospect of a Corbyn prime ministership is very real.

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Mass participation coincided with the ratcheting up of nuclear tensions between the superpowers – it happened in the early 1960s, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and again in the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration was trying to win the arms race. It hasn’t happened since. Today, CND is a shell of what it was, with only a few thousand members and almost no public profile. The irony is that one of its most committed supporters, Jeremy Corbyn, was elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015 and could yet find himself as British prime minister. Nuclear disarmament still animates Corbyn, but it barely resonates with his supporters from a younger generation, who have little memory of the Cold War. Corbyn was obliged to run in the 2017 British general election on a manifesto that committed the UK to retaining its Trident nuclear deterrent.

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In Britain, the Labour Party has bucked the trend of other declining social democratic parties in Europe by recasting itself as a social movement. Offering those who join a voice that can be used against the party’s representatives in parliament, it has revived its mass membership. Its present leader, Jeremy Corbyn, repeatedly insists that the members are not there to be used by the MPs but the other way round. In the United States, Trump won the presidency by running his own political movement against the Republican Party elite. Sanders almost did the same by running against the Democratic Party establishment.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

I’m not wild about fannish cults surrounding politicians. I’d rather have the hard-working, principled, slightly dull Clem Attlee over sordid ‘characters’ like Boris Johnson any day. But if we’re going to have cults, let’s reserve them for people like Nye. When I have winced behind splayed fingers as Jeremy Corbyn has scuttled in disdain and fear from journalists’ perfectly reasonable questions, flanked by minders who bleat about him being ‘hassled’, I wonder what Nye would have done. I think I know the answer. He would have wrestled the mike from them, jumped on the nearest table, dealt with any questions and still be talking now.

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That week in spring, the public institutions of this corner of Manchester have had two famous visitors. Prime Minister Theresa May, flanked by armed police outriders in a thundering motorcade, visited a local junior school. Here she met awkwardly with children who were specially selected and vetted by staff and instructed not to mention any recent political events or Jeremy Corbyn. More significantly for the people of the area, Sir Alex Ferguson had been admitted to Salford Royal with a suspected bleed on the brain. (‘We’re nearer,’ smiles Julie, ‘but they’re a centre of excellence. He’s absolutely in the right place.’) While I’m at Trafford General, the visitors come and go, less famous but no less welcome.

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The former were encouraged by one of their braying leaders ‘not to attack any BBC journalists … just for today’, while one of the latter told me, ‘We know who you are,’ after I’d expressed my lack of sympathy for their cause. On another occasion, a screaming man with a frankly unnecessary loudhailer berated me for the BBC’s beastliness to Jeremy Corbyn and, by extension, the oppressed peoples of the world. Depending on my mood on the day, I sometimes think that making enemies of these people, less different from each other than they would like to think, shows that ‘we’ are doing the right thing and are on the side of the angels. Other times I just want to go to their place of work with a badly drawn placard and shout garbage through their windows all day, harassing them and their colleagues.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

It will be so much worse in the future. And we haven’t been able to do anything about it so far.” In the brave new world of digital politics, truth and falsehood have become malleable concepts. Anything goes. During a TV debate ahead of the 2019 British general election between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservative Party renamed its Twitter account factcheckUK, and then used it to push out partisan messages designed to look like independent verification. When called out, the Conservatives doubled down. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said that voters “don’t give a toss” about what happens online.

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Created just five weeks before the vote and closely linked to Brexit Party MEP Brian Monteith, Capitalist Worker spent almost £40,000 on Facebook ads that predominantly targeted men aged between 18 and 34. The adverts were most frequently viewed in a number of working-class Labour ‘red wall’ seats that were key to the Conservatives’ election strategy.58 Another new Facebook page spent more than £55,000 on adverts attacking Jeremy Corbyn’s housing policy, warning that “landlords will lose their livelihood overnight”.59 The ads were bought in the name of Jennifer Powers, the lobbyist who worked for Shanker Singham’s private consultancy and had been a member of the Alternative Arrangements Commission alongside the Institute of Economic Affairs’ trade advisor.

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As Peter Pomerantsev notes, “In an age in which all the old ideologies have vanished and there is no competition over coherent political ideas, the aim becomes to lasso together disparate groups around a new notion of the people, an amorphous but powerful emotion that each can interpret in their own way, and then seal it by conjuring up phantom enemies who threaten to undermine it.”82 The technological revolution in politics is more likely to speed up than slow down. A few weeks before the 2019 British general election, a video showing Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn endorsing each other for prime minister spread online. It was obviously a fake – created in an attempt to demonstrate the potential for ‘deepfake’ videos to undermine democracy – but it was real enough to show what could soon be available to unscrupulous and well-funded operators. Britain faces “a perfect storm” of digital disruption and weak rules, Louise Edwards told me as we sat in a nondescript meeting room in the Electoral Commission’s offices.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

., and Pickard, J., “How Change UK crashed and burned”, Financial Times, 5 Jun. 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/f33596da-87a2-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2 14 “His approval rating was just 16% versus a disapproval rating of 76%. Jeremy Corbyn has lowest leadership satisfaction rating for any opposition leader since 1977”, Ipsos MORI, 20 Sep. 2019, https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/jeremy-corbyn-has-lowest-leadership-satisfaction-rating-any-opposition-leader-1977. 15 Douthat, R., “The Rise of Woke Capital”, New York Times, 28 Feb. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/corporate-america-activism.html 16 Bain, M., “Nike’s Kaepernick ad is what happens when capitalism and activism collide”, Quartz, 29 Sep. 2018, https://qz.com/1400583/modern-corporate-social-activism-looks-like-nikes-kaepernick-ad/ 17 “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be”, Gillette, 13 Jan. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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Contrary to what the advocates of market liberalization would predict, the Bretton Woods system provided the most stable period in the history of capitalism and also its fastest growing. Source: Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff (2009). What has changed since the crisis is the opposition to capitalism. Whether it comes in the form of grassroots movements like Occupy Wall Street, the rise of the populist left through figures like Bernie Sanders in the US or Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, or the anti-globalization backlash from the supporters of Brexit and Trump, there is a growing sense that the last four decades of Western history under liberal capitalism have been a disappointment. Particularly since many of the laissez-faire policies applied during this period promised to “democratize” the economy by reigning in the state and offering opportunity and choice But it is fortunate for the defenders of laissez-faire that an alternative to capitalism has remained elusive in mainstream discourse.

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Much like the North Koreans, the defenders of liberal capitalism have threatened their critics that any major systemic changes to the economic status quo will result in unbearable economic dislocation and massive destruction of wealth for rich and poor alike. Not a day seemingly goes by without the right-wing and centrist media reminding its viewers that the economic policies espoused by “radical” left politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Jeremy Corbyn will inevitably turn their countries into Venezuela. Or that socialist and redistributive policies may work in countries like the Nordics but, for unexplained reasons, not in countries like the US (universal healthcare being the most egregious example). These arguments preclude an honest comparative discussion of economic models in mainstream discourse, which further reinforces the fear factor when policies that go against the prevailing orthodoxy are proposed.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Like the Trump campaign they ran many different versions, testing them in an interactive feedback loop.*15 The evolution never stops. In the 2017 UK general election, the Labour Party took a different approach, although the overall aim – to change the information environment – was the same.16 Rather than sponsored ads, Jeremy Corbyn’s fans produced huge volumes of ‘organic’ content themselves and shared it in tightly networked groups, meaning their messages – real things written by real people – reached far more people and were more believable than they would otherwise have been. There was also an ecosystem of left-wing ‘alternative news’ outlets that churned out widely shared and hyper-partisan pro-Corbyn stories.

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Several pilot schemes, including Oakland, California and Finland, are examining the idea (although it’s too early to say how well they are working yet), and a number of serious thinkers and writers believe it is worth further investigation. In other words, UBI has become very fashionable. For some people on the political right, it is a way to keep capitalism ticking over in times of economic uncertainty. For some on the left, including a handful of radicals in the UK circling Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, it represents a way to redistribute wealth more fairly. And for the utopians, it would allow people to do more meaningful things with their lives than monotonous labour.* Sam doesn’t think anyone is ready for AI. ‘We are going to need to have new distribution, new social safety nets,’ he told me in his Y Combinator office.

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One of Facebook’s most useful services is called ‘Lookalike Audiences’ – it allows an advertiser to provide Facebook with a small group of known supporters, and ask Facebook to expand it out. Facebook can create groups of people who are similar to the initial group and then target them. 21 Helen Lewis, ‘How Jeremy Corbyn won Facebook’, www.newstatesman.com, 20 July 2016. 22 J. Baldwin-Philippi (2017), ‘The myths of data-driven campaigning’, Political Communication, 34(4), 627-633. 23 Tamsin Shaw, ‘Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind’, New York Review of Books, 20 April 2017. 24 Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, (Profile, 2014). 25 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Vote Leave donations: the dark ads, the mystery “letter” – and Brexit’s online guru’, www.theguardian.com, 25 November 2017. 26 Tom Hamburger, ‘Cruz campaign credits psychological data and analytics for its rising success’, www.washingtonpost.com, 13 December 2015. 27 Matea Gold and Frances Stead Sellers, ‘After working for Trump’s campaign, British data firm eyes new U.S. government contracts’, www.washingtonpost.com, 17 February 2017. 28 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warefare tool’, Observer, 18 March 2018. 29 Nina Burleigh, ibid. 30 Lucy Handley, ‘Personalized TV commercials are coming to a screen near you; US marketers to spend $3 billion on targeted ads’, www.cnbc.com, 15 August 2017. 31 E.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

Populism offers an alternative bypass: charismatic leaders with remedies so obvious that they can be grasped instantly. Often, the two fused, becoming yet more potent: once-discredited ideologies refurbished with impassioned leaders peddling enticing new remedies. Hail to the herald: from the radical left, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon; from the nativists, Marine Le Pen and Norbert Hofer; from the secessionists, Nigel Farage, Alex Salmond and Carles Puigdemont; and from the world of celebrity entertainers, Beppe Grillo and Donald Trump. Currently, the political battlefield is seemingly characterized by alarmed and indignant Utilitarian and Rawlsian vanguards under assault from populist ideologues.

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Between the British elections of 2010 and 2017, the Labour Party changed its process of selecting a leader. In 2010, its archetypal Utilitarian social-democrat leader, Gordon Brown, had come to the leadership as the unopposed choice of Labour Members of Parliament. By 2017 the party was led by a Marxist populist, Jeremy Corbyn, who had minimal support from Labour MPs but had been elected by passionate young idealists who had been given the right to easy membership of the party.* This measure had almost completely changed the Labour Party’s composition. On the right, David Cameron, the centrist leader in 2010, had been replaced in 2016 by the unknown quantity of Teresa May, a desperate measure by Conservative MPs designed to avoid following the new constitution of the party, which required that the leader be elected by party members.

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This appeared likely to elect a maverick ideologue, as it had done when first used in 2001. Currently, Britain’s two main political parties have leadership selection systems that, if used, almost guarantee that the menu of political choices will consist of polarizing ideologues – vegan or veal, sir? In the 2017 election, Jeremy Corbyn pitched an ideological populism of the left, whereas Teresa May failed to articulate a coherent strategy, leaving voters bereft of choice and resulting in a hung parliament. Even in Germany, Chancellor Merkel’s brief flirtation with a curious blend of Rawlsian legalism and populism that opened Germany’s borders for a few months, was sufficient to drive one-in-eight voters to a new Nativist party in the 2017 election.

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now by Roger Scruton

bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Corn Laws, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, garden city movement, George Akerlof, housing crisis, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, old-boy network, open borders, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, sceptred isle, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, web of trust

We read that the young voted by two to one to remain in the European Union, even if a third of them did not bother to vote. Again, in the subsequent general election the young voted in unprecedented numbers, organizing through social media and university networks in support of the radical oikophobe, Jeremy Corbyn.1 How do we interpret these facts, and what lesson should we take for our policy now? If there is to be a positive story told on behalf of the course that our country has chosen, it must be told to the young and by the young, with some hope of engaging their sympathy. And it must begin from an understanding of the many things that have been subsumed under the concept of globalization.

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That kind of sovereignty is part of being a genuine ‘we’, a first-person plural of mutual commitment. And it is a real question whether young people see a place for it in a fully networked world. Of course, they can use their networks to influence parliamentary elections too, and undoubtedly this happened in the recent British general election, in which Jeremy Corbyn was able to capture the vote of the young, and to achieve the entirely unpredicted outcome of a hung Parliament. As with the original selection of Corbyn as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, the main factor behind his successful campaign was the Internet, and the ability of his young supporters to combine outside the meetings and committees of the old party machine.

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For many young people, especially in Britain and Germany, globalization is another name for ‘neo-liberalism’, itself the latest incarnation of international capitalism. And to resist capitalism, they suppose, we need a global system of control, so as to regulate the networks that pose the principal threat to those who have no say in the present scheme of things. The youth vote for Jeremy Corbyn was a vote against capitalism. It was emphatically not a vote for the nation, as the true counter to global networks. Likewise, the youth vote to remain in the European Union was a vote to control the capitalists, the financiers and those who had supposedly brought about the economic crisis of 2007–8.

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, clockwatching, collective bargaining, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, fake news, game design, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, plutocrats, post-industrial society, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, young professional

And because the cost of renting and living in the cities where the work is concentrated is becoming prohibitively expensive, she is too fearful of losing the work she has to complain about her conditions. Arthur gets to blame immigrants; middle-class young professionals in similar situations, albeit office as opposed to van-based, are too well educated to fall for that, but instead fondly imagine that the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, will somehow be able to deliver a brave new world. So these are the new ‘normals’: bosses get to do more or less what they want, while workers either blame their plight on immigration or ignore it altogether because the cost of simply staying afloat has become so high. Neither constituency routinely expects to become a homeowner anymore and so the most fundamental aim of capitalism – security through property – is increasingly debased.

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The younger sections of society, whose taxes will effectively subsidise the care of the ageing sections, are being required to work in circumstances and for wages vastly inferior to their predecessors’, without being offered any permanent stake in that society. The older sections, meanwhile, cling to the illusion that the travails of their children and grandchildren are largely self-inflicted. If nothing else, it unravels the riddle of Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity that still causes such bafflement in so many corners of the political and media establishment. He at least articulates the sense that things can’t go on like this, that the Scylla and Charybdis of demographics and economics will crush us all, unless drastic action is taken. Beyond Brexit and the existential threat it poses to the Union, determining what that action will be is surely the issue that will define the coming decades of UK politics.

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If that seems too uncomfortable a challenge, stop socialising with these people. Stop being friends with them outside the studio. Our job is to hold them to account, not to keep them sweet in the hope of a flattering quote on the cover of our next book. Make it crystal clear that, for example, Jeremy Corbyn could have a prime interview slot on any programme in the country any time he wanted. Drown out the democracy-defying hog-wash that he shouldn’t talk to the ‘mainstream media’ because it’s so biased against him, by making it clear that he can have all the time in the world to prove his fitness to govern after he has been asked a few questions that potential Labour voters want answers to.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

If the Russia Scare version of the establishment’s anti-populist story line is to be believed, the government of Russian president Vladimir Putin successfully used Western social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to hypnotize substantial numbers of citizens of North America and Europe into voting against their natural inclinations for Brexit or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders in 2016. Even the French yellow vest protests and the gains made by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the British general election of 2017 have been attributed to Russian machinations online.3 The “Russiagate” scandal began before Trump’s election as the Clinton campaign, some anti-Trump Republicans, elements in the Obama administration, and various members of the US law enforcement and national security establishments spread rumors of alleged links between Russia and the Trump campaign to the media, including the false story that Trump was being blackmailed by Moscow with a videotape of him consorting with Russian prostitutes.

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According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane.49 If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society. * * * — IN REALITY, POLITICS does not imitate sensational thriller fiction. US president Donald Trump and British prime minister Boris Johnson and Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn are not Russian agents of influence installed by Moscow in pursuit of a sinister grand design to overthrow liberal democracy in the West and the world. Even so, the Russian government, like all major countries, employs intelligence operatives whose actions should be monitored and thwarted when they go beyond the low-level activities tolerated by both sides in modern great power relations.

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David Marcus, “Antifa Is Mostly Made Up of Privileged White Dudes,” The Federalist, July 1, 2019. 3. Carol Matlack and Robert Williams, “France to Probe Possible Russian Influence on Yellow Vest Riots,” Bloomberg, December 7, 2018; “Exposed: Russian Twitter Bots Tried to Swing General Election for Jeremy Corbyn,” Sunday Times, April 29, 2018. 4. Matt Taibbi, “As the Mueller Probe Ends, New Russiagate Myths Begin,” Rolling Stone, March 25, 2019. 5. Jeffrey M. Jones, “More in U.S. Favor Diplomacy Over Sanctions for Russia,” Gallup, August 20, 2018. 6. Aaron Mate, “New Studies Show Pundits Are Wrong About Russian Social-Media Involvement in US Politics,” The Nation, December 28, 2018. 7.

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

There’s no doubt that both government and media were wrong-footed in recent years by unexpected outcomes that fundamentally changed both national and international politics. Leadership is simply no longer just about facts but about feelings as well. Three dolly-zoom, double-take shocks illustrate this. First, the candidate with the fewest nominations in the 2015 Labour Party leadership contest was Jeremy Corbyn. Very few expected him to follow Gordon Brown and Tony Blair as party leader: the betting odds were 100–1 against.1 Even fewer expected him to win by a landslide, taking 60 per cent of the votes in the first round. We love an underdog. Only up to a point, though: he fought two elections and lost both, the latter marking Labour’s worst defeat since 1935.2 Second, Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016.

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They were Margaret Thatcher in 1983 and 1987 and Tony Blair in 1997 and 2001.21 People seem to forget that it was for good reasons that Tony Blair was the first and only Labour Prime Minister ever to be returned to office after not one election but three in a row. It’s the only time it happened in one hundred years of the Labour movement. Just think about that for a second. All the way from Sidney and Beatrice Webb through Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan and Manny Shinwell to Barbara Castle, Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn. He was strong enough to fight the laziness of complacent thinking. It’s important to understand that when the Labour Party learns nothing, forgets nothing and offers nothing dressed up as something, the result lets down progressively minded members in both parties. THE DANGERS OF A LARGE MAJORITY An essential hallmark of democracy is that all change initially begins as minority dissent.

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Come polling day, our age will do a lot of work in explaining who we vote for.25 The dominant factor of age was illustrated by the 2019 election result: Discussing the election result in The Times on 17 December 2019, Matt Chorley said: The age at which voters are more likely to vote Tory than Labour dropped dramatically as younger people fell out of love with Jeremy Corbyn. In 2017, when Theresa May lost her majority, the crossover point at which people were more likely to be Conservatives occurred at age forty-seven. In [the 2019] election result this fell to thirty-nine. So, in 2019, the crossover happened earlier and the age skew was bigger still. The political irony may be that while youth is no advantage, all representatives need a positive, future-orientated narrative.

Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

The bill includes a deep cut to corporate taxes from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. Unions and campaigners have strongly argued for some of those tax breaks to be passed on to the workforce and a handful of companies have increased wages, but this has not been widespread. While higher rates of tax for top earners, such as that suggested by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election campaign, are often lambasted by political rivals, they can be popular with the public. It is not radical to ask those with the deepest pockets to contribute more, especially as they have benefitted so much from the current economic set-up. Higher top rates of tax have got to be part of the overall solution to inequality but will not solve things on their own.

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It is at least a first step to require companies to publish their ratios. Procurement power While critics are quick to dismiss the publication of pay ratios as another meaningless figure, they can be used in interesting ways. They give national, state and local governments market power over companies seeking contracts with them. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader, has suggested that companies bidding for government contracts should be subject to a maximum wage cap – meeting a 20 to 1 pay ratio between top and bottom. At the beginning of 2017, Mr Corbyn said ‘A 20:1 ratio means someone earning the living wage, just over £16,000 a year, would permit an executive to be earning nearly £350,000.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The Occupy movement that emerged in 2011 to protest against the banks made public assembly its central political purpose, and took the cold, scientific language of statistics and turned it into a mobilizing identity with the famous slogan “we are the 99%.” Left-wing leaders, such as Alexis Tsipras in Greece, Pablo Iglesias in Spain and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, have placed renewed political emphasis on the ability to bring large numbers of people together in public spaces. Here too, the size of rallies stirs a range of emotions from both supporters and opponents: exuberance, scorn, empathy, misinformation, hope, and resentment. Corbyn’s rallies have frequently provoked complaints from his supporters that they are not being adequately covered by the mainstream media, despite their apparently vast scale.

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The global financial crisis began deep within the financial system itself, well beyond the purview of most members of the public, but soon revealed itself as an epic failure of numerical calculation on the part of credit-rating agencies and investment analysts. Opinion polling is another area of mathematical modeling that appears to have gone wrong in recent years, as it failed to adequately detect unexpected surges of support for Donald Trump and Brexit in 2016 and Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. Do numbers still tell the truth? Do they still adequately represent how things are? The answer depends heavily on how they are produced and by whom. The credibility of statistics and economics has profound political implications for how we achieve consensus on the government of society.

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Pollsters can look at previous rates of voter turnout among different sections of the population, but these can change in either direction. Political alienation manifests itself in non-voting, but if a leader or campaign can convert this into anger, it can swiftly be channeled into the electoral system. This is precisely what Trump and the Brexit campaigns did in 2016, and what Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party did in 2017, confounding predictions in the process. On the night of Britain’s EU referendum, the first sign that the Leave campaign was doing better than predicted were the reports of higher turnout: anti-EU sentiment is stronger than pro-EU sentiment, and this had led people to the polls who didn’t usually vote at all.

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of by Mick Hume

anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, colonial rule, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeremy Corbyn, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, Slavoj Žižek, the scientific method, We are the 99%, World Values Survey

After all, the Remain campaign had marshalled every authority in the Western world to warn those British voters that a Leave vote would lead to economic ruination, a political descent into barbarism, world war and, worse, falling house prices. They had been told to vote Remain by the leaders of all Britain’s mainstream political parties, from Tory prime minister David Cameron to left-wing Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. They had been instructed that there was no realistic alternative to voting Remain by the governor of the Bank of England, the Chancellor of Germany, the President of the United States, a cross-section of leading lights from the arts and every imaginable celebrity from David Beckham to Johnny Rotten.

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The Remain campaign’s slogan might as well have been ‘You may not be EU-phoric about it – but Brexit means Brex-termination!’ The only semi-positive corollary of the negative case for Remain was the promise that the EU could be made to change for the better, especially if Britain fought for that change from the inside. In the words of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (a long-standing radical opponent of the EU who abandoned his principle and joined the conformist Remain camp when it mattered), we should vote and campaign for ‘Remain and Reform’. The idea is apparently to fight to make Brussels fill in its ‘democratic deficit’, to make the EU more democratic and accountable from within.

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In the 1975 referendum on whether the UK should remain a member of what was then the ‘Common Market’, two of the most prominent supporters of the ‘No’ camp were the leading left-wing Labour MPs Tony Benn and Michael Foot, who later became party leader. These leaders of the Left were so committed to getting Britain out of the ‘capitalist club’ in Europe that they were unfazed by finding themselves on the same ‘No’ side as the anti-immigrant right-winger Enoch ‘rivers of blood’ Powell. Yet in 2016 left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – a former acolyte of the late Tony Benn and long-term opponent of the EU – signed up to the Remain campaign, along with most of his party’s MPs, members and celebrity fans. What happened in the forty years between to explain this change? The shorthand version of what happened is that the Left in the UK and across Europe lost the political war at home, and so sought refuge in the EU.

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

There aren’t many takers for absolute global freedom of movement. But to spell out the exact nature and justification of the consequent limits to absolute freedom provokes in liberals a fear of infection with the disease of racial exclusivity. The shudders that greeted Gordon Brown’s ‘British jobs for British workers’ comment, or Jeremy Corbyn’s complaint of ‘wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe’, are proof enough. To the extent that there is a Remainer folk myth, it only underlines these liberal contradictions. One of the oddities of Britain’s new division is that the tags are the wrong way round: Leavers are really Remainers, in the sense they’re the ones who want to stay in an idealised version of a more ‘traditional’ Britain – they wish things had remained as they were, whenever that was; and Remainers are actually Leavers.

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Victoria Ayling was beaten into third place by the Conservatives. Nationally, David Cameron’s Conservatives won. The Liberal Democrats they’d reluctantly shared government with for the previous five years were annihilated at the polls. Ukip won a single seat. When Labour appointed as its new leader Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing backbencher known, as far as he was known at all, for anti-militarism, defending the rights of Palestinians and Irish Republicans, rebelling against his own party and addressing protestors at demonstrations, it seemed to many establishment commentators that Cameron’s hold on power was secure.

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He takes from the rich to give to the poor. It’s a plan. Taking from the rich to give to the poor has been, is and should be the way forward for an exploited majority against remote, unaccountable concentrations of extreme wealth and power. One word for it is ‘redistribution’. Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Bernie Saunders. He’s Yanis Varoufakis. So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the unemployed, the disabled, refugees – have been put into the conceptual box where the rich used to be.

A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About by Kevin Meagher

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, kremlinology, land reform, Nelson Mandela, period drama, Right to Buy, trade route, transaction costs

The DUP knows only too well it would have got a better financial deal from Labour than the one it subsequently received from the Conservative–Lib Dem coalition government. Indeed, James Callaghan’s government was kept afloat in the late 1970s by bartering tactical deals with minority parties, including, back then, the Ulster Unionists. What of the contemporary party? Under Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, the party is now led by two of Parliament’s few, undiluted long-time supporters of Irish Republicanism. This has not gone unremarked, with taunts of ‘IRA sympathiser’ emanating from the usual suspects in the right-wing British media, the Conservative benches, and a good few barbs from his own colleagues in the Labour Party.

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So, in his first few weeks as Labour leader, Corbyn found himself refusing to condemn the Provisional IRA in a BBC interview and was even criticised for the fairly unremarkable act of sharing a coffee with Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland Martin McGuinness and Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams in a café in the Houses of Parliament. As a classic ‘campaigning backbencher’, Jeremy Corbyn holds radical views on a range of issues that sit outside the comfort zone of mainstream politics, particularly about the Israel–Palestine conflict and the broader Middle East. These are seen by his critics as emblematic of his naiveté about paramilitary organisations, raising questions about his suitability for high office.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

IEEE Spectrum, June 1, 2008. http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/tech-luminaries-address-singularity. Isaac, Mike. “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide.” New York Times, March 3, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. “Jeremy Corbyn, Entrepreneur.” Economist, June 15, 2017. http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21723426-labours-leader-has-disrupted-business-politics-jeremy-corbyn-entrepreneur. Kahan, Dan M., Donald Braman, John Gastil, Paul Slovic, and C. K. Mertz. “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White-Male Effect in Risk Perception.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 4, no. 3 (November 2007): 465–505.

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Software development is primarily a craft, and like any other craft—woodworking, glassblowing—it takes a very long time (and a period of apprenticeship) to achieve competence at it. Engaging in and democratizing that development work might not look or sound as sexy as coming up with some earth-shattering tech idea, but it’s where the future lies. Notes 1. “Jeremy Corbyn, Entrepreneur.” 2. Terwiesch and Xu, “Innovation Contests, Open Innovation, and Multiagent Problem Solving.” 3. Morais, “The Unfunniest Joke in Technology.” 4. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 5. Seife, Proofiness; Kovach and Rosenstiel, Blur. 11 Third-Wave AI In the book so far, we’ve looked at why AI doesn’t work as well as we might expect.

Operation Lighthouse: Reflections on Our Family's Devastating Story of Coercive Control and Domestic Homicide by Luke Hart, Ryan Hart

access to a mobile phone, Jeremy Corbyn, late fees, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Skype, zero-sum game

In the words of the great Angela Davis, ‘I’m no longer accepting the things I cannot change, I’m changing the things I cannot accept’, and it is with this boldness that Luke and Ryan have used their own experience of domestic abuse to help others. They share their story so honestly because they, like me, believe that together we can change society. Jeremy Corbyn MP Preface This book was initially written by Luke for Ryan. It was intended to communicate pain too raw and unyielding for us to address in person, too deep and enduring to address in the shortness of spoken conversation. It grew into a collaborative conversation between the two of us.

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Chris Green OBE is the founder of White Ribbon UK, a campaign for men who have pledged never to commit, excuse or remain silent about male violence against women and girls. We strongly believe that men engaging in such campaigns is a crucial step to overcome the abuse that women and children suffer. Men must collectively take responsibility for domestic abuse; it is a crime carried out in our all of our names. Finally, we are deeply humbled by Jeremy Corbyn’s participation – we could never have expected so many influential individuals would wish to support us in our work. It is so important to have men and women’s voices side-by-side on an issue that exists as a consequence of the polarisation of gender. We hope our story can show how we had so much more in common with our mother and sister than our father.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

The divisions can be seen in what we get angry about. When Nigel Farage complained about feeling uncomfortable in a train carriage with no English speakers in it, the outrage in Anywhere media reverberated for several days, but anecdotal evidence suggested that 60 or 70 per cent of the country thought what he said was just common sense. Or when Jeremy Corbyn did not sing the national anthem on one of his first outings as Labour leader, it was the Somewheres’ turn to be infuriated. Anywheres were more likely to think it was an amusing media confection. A free society has many conflicting values and strands of opinion, but if the value gulf becomes too deep—especially between the dominant class and the rest—we become vulnerable to shocks and backlashes like Brexit.

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This shrinkage means that most members and activists will be from similar backgrounds to the MPs and are likely to form an echo chamber around them. The Labour Party has, at least for now, reversed this long decline in party membership with a surge of mainly young leftists joining the party to support the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, which has taken membership back up to 515,000 (plus affiliated supporters). The Corbyn movement could be described as populist in economics but extreme Anywhere in most other respects. What it has not done is change the social composition of the party—about three quarters of Labour party members are middle class, about 60 per cent are graduates, and almost 40 per cent live in London and the South East.15 The decline of corporatism has also had a narrowing effect on politics.

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And back in 1970 it was 10 million to 2 million.35 (The working class in the occupational sense also declined sharply during that period, from outnumbering middle class voters two to one in the 1960s the workers are now in turn outnumbered four to three.) UKIP turned out to appeal just as much to working-class voters as middle-class ones and, along with the SNP, helped to undermine Labour in the 2015 election. Jeremy Corbyn’s version of old, statist Labour may appeal to some working class voters but his Anywhere/Global Villager values are profoundly alienating to most. In the 1980s, the Labour party’s problem was conveying its support for working class affluence and aspiration—a problem that New Labour emerged to answer.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

For them, Brussels’ refusal to accept British control over the inflow from the continent was the last straw. Nevertheless, Britain’s exit from Europe was far from certain. National politics is highly visible, EU politics is not. So when national politicians who back the EU are popular, EU popularity rides high. Cameron enjoyed much higher approval than Labour’s new far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Cameron’s popularity should have buoyed the case for Remain. On the other hand, when the party that people support bashes the EU and says leaving Europe is an important issue, many voters tune in to that issue and follow suit.90 UKIP played this role, raising anti-EU consciousness in the 2000s with its steady drumbeat of anti-EU soundbites and infomercials.

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Still, Harold Clarke, Matt Goodwin and Paul Whiteley show, using monthly survey data, that anti-EU sentiment was volatile after 2004: cresting at 54 per cent in 2011 before falling back to 37 per cent after Cameron’s election in 2015, then beginning to rise again, until the EU referendum.91 In February 2016, upon returning from Brussels, Cameron announced that the referendum would be held on 23 June. The Remain camp featured David Cameron and prominent Remain Conservative frontbenchers such as George Osborne. Theresa May, the future Prime Minister, was in the Remain camp, but kept a low profile. On the Labour side, Jeremy Corbyn backed Remain. However, as an unpopular figure among centrist Labour voters who had himself voted against staying in Europe in 1975, Corbyn was of limited use to the cause. Each of the parties ran its own campaign, hoping to leverage party loyalty to convince its base to back Remain and turn out to the polls.

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His resignation set in motion a fast-moving piece of political theatre in which leading candidates Boris Johnson and Michael Gove eliminated each other in a plot reminiscent of Julius Caesar. This led to the emergence of Theresa May as Prime Minister. May initially enjoyed an unprecedented advantage over Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. By 18 April 2017, when May called a general election, polling aggregators showed her leading 42–26 over her Labour rival, with UKIP on 11 per cent. But in the ensuing six weeks the mood of the country changed. Many saw May’s gambit as an opportunistic attempt to increase the size of her majority.

Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe

British Empire, disinformation, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Suez canal 1869, WikiLeaks

The two-states solution, indirectly one should say, is based on the assumption that Israel and Judaism are the same. Thus, Israel insists that what it does, it does in the name of Judaism, and when its actions are rejected by people around the world the criticism is not only directed toward Israel but also towards Judaism. The leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, attracted of a lot of criticism when he explained, to my mind correctly, that blaming Judaism for Netanyahu’s policies is like blaming Islam for the actions of the Islamic State. This is a valid comparison, even if it rattled some people’s sensitivities.1 The two-states solution is like a corpse taken out in the morgue every now and then, dressed up nicely, and presented as a living thing.

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“WikiLeaks: Israel Aimed to Keep Gaza Economy on the Brink of Collapse,” Reuters, January 5, 2011. 33.Morrison, “The Israel-Hamas Ceasefire.” 34.See the B’Tselem report “Fatalities during Operation Cast Lead,” at btselem. org. 35.“Gaza Could Become Uninhabitable in Less Than Five Years Due to Ongoing ‘De-development’,” UN News Centre, September 1, 2015, at un.org. 10 The Two-States Solution Is the Only Way Forward 1.Daniel Clinton, “Jeremy Corbyn Appears to Compare Supporters of Israel with ISIS at Release of Anti-Semitism Report,” Jerusalem Post, June 30, 2016. 2.On the dictionary see Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, On Palestine, London: Penguin, 2016. Index 1967 (Segev), 71, 161n3 Abbas, Mahmoud (Abu Mazen), 116–17, 119 Abdel-Shafi, Haidar, 98 Abu Dis, 99, 102 Acre, 6, 9, 37, 62 Adams, John, 13 al-Husayni, Hajj Amin, 47 al-Husseini, Faysal, 98 al-Mujama al-Islamiya (Islamic Society), 115–16 al-Qassam, Izz ad-Din, 46–7, 48 al-Rantisi, Abul Aziz, 121, 124 Alexander, Michael Solomon, 16 Ali, Mohamet (Muhammad), 15 Aliyahs, First and Second, 18 Alon, Yigal, 34, 35, 70, 78, 123 Alterman, Natan, 87 Altnueland (Herzl), 30 American Council of Judaism (ACJ), 26 Americans, see United States Amnesty International, 94–5 Apartheid (South Africa), 42, 146 Arab Higher Committee, 46, 58, 100 Arab League, 58, 100 Arafat, Yasser, 97, 98–9, 106–7, 109, 112, 116–17 Area A, 125 Area C, 106, 142 Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Gilbert), 39 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 23, 44 Balfour Declaration, 13, 19–20, 53 Barak, Ehud, 99, 102, 107 Bavli, Dan, 79 Begin, Menachem, 78 Beilin, Yossi, 102, 129 Beirut, 9 Ben-Gurion, David, 33, 34, 37, 40, 43–4, 51–2, 53, 55, 61–2, 69, 70–1, 72–3 Ben-Gurion airport, 127, 136 Benvenisiti, Meron, 105 Berlin to Jerusalem (Scholem), 25 The Bible and Colonialism (Prior), 35 The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (Morris), 53 Blair, Tony, 120, 123 Blyth, George Francis Popham, 16 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 12 Boomerang (Shelah and Drucker), 108 Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, 95–6, 129, 144 Brightman, Thomas, 11 Britain, 8, 12, 13–14, 18–20, 28, 44–5, 53–4, 58 B’Tselem, 95, 130–1 Buber, Martin, 37 Bundists, 27–8 Bush, George H.

London Review of Books by London Review of Books

Albert Einstein, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Jeremy Corbyn, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Piers Corbyn, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, tulip mania, Wolfgang Streeck

Then, as secretary of state for social security, Harman had wanted to refuse to make the cuts, but didn’t have the nerve, especially after Brown told her she’d be responsible for bringing down the government; now, when she had the power to make the decisions herself, she again lost her nerve: she left Northern Irish women with absolutely no abortion rights and enabled, and even backed, benefit cuts to a group she came into politics to help. Among the 48 Labour MPs who voted against the welfare bill was Jeremy Corbyn, soon to be elected as leader. He had tried for Harman’s Peckham seat (his brother, Piers, was leader of the local squatters) before being elected in Islington North in 1983, but although they had both been Labour MPs for London seats for more than thirty years she says she hardly knew him. Her book was written before this year’s general election and doesn’t anticipate Corbyn’s surprising success in it.

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His future prospects rest on the outcome of the gamble that underpins his entire project: that it is ultimately the politics of class and conflict, not nationality and consensus-building, which can win working-class Scots back to Labour. That outlook has been the object of derision for decades – but so was Jeremy Corbyn. * * * Out of Babel Michael Hofmann | 2076 words Collected Poems by Thomas Bernhard, translated by James Reidel Chicago, 459 pp., £25, June, ISBN: 978 0 85742 426 6 The posthumous progress in English of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the translator herself of the posthumous My Prizes , in an exquisitely bound volume from Notting Hill Editions, with a justly amused introduction by Frances Wilson: ‘Few writers have received more applause than Thomas Bernhard, Austrian novelist, playwright and enfant terrible , and few have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped.’

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth S. Anderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, declining real wages, deskilling, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, means of production, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen

These Tanner lectures were presented shortly after “lovers of liberty and justice in Britain” used Rainborough’s words at Putney to inspire their opposition to a Global Law Summit denounced as “a shameless festival of corporate networking.”7 As the lectures were given, British activists, film-makers, songwriters, and historians were celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Lilburne, the most celebrated Leveller leader. Among these activists were Tariq Ali and Jeremy Corbyn, now the leader of the British Labour Party. John Lilburne is said to be the historical figure Corbyn most admires, while Tariq Ali, like Professor Anderson, has seen the agitation of the 1640s as a resource for thinking about present dilemmas, but he was prompted, not to a defense of market relations but to call for a new “Grand Remonstrance” that would demand the “nationalization” of the railways and public utilities (what British socialists used to call the commanding heights of the economy), returning them to public/state ownership.8 Mid-seventeenth-century English history can provide profoundly divergent legacies for our contemporary world.

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The organizers of the summit located it in the context of celebrations of the anniversary of Magna Carta: “Rally at Runnymede,” https://www.opendemocracy.net/rally-at-runnymede-and-join-opposition; Anthony Barnett, New Statesman, February 26, 2015, on the “spirit of Rainborough.” 8. Speakers at the “Lilburne 400 Conference” held on March 14, 2015, at the Bishopgate Institute in London included several historians who had written on the Levellers, alongside the radical lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, and the politicians Tariq Ali and Jeremy Corbyn MP. It was organized by the Leveller Association: www.leveller.org.uk. Corbyn attended the launch of John Rees’s book, Leveller Revolution, in November 2016, and see also the article by Edward Vallance in the Guardian, August 20, 2015, and for Ali, Guardian, February 20, 2015. The original Grand Remonstrance was a denunciation of the personal rule of Charles I produced by the House of Commons.

The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

This will mean ending the disproportionate power of capital over labour; restoring the dignity of work and the strength of vocation and manufacturing; and giving working people a voice in the as yet impenetrable cultural bastions. Notes 1 ‘It’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses’, Foreign Policy, 28 June 2016. 2 British Social Attitudes Survey 33, 2016. 3 Benjamin Butterworth, ‘Jeremy Corbyn “couldn’t lead the working class out of a paper bag”, Alan Johnson says after exit poll result’, i, 13 December 2019. 4 ‘Dawn Butler: “If anyone doesn’t hate Brexit – even if you voted for it – there’s something wrong with you”’, Turning Point UK, 13 December 2019. 5 Terry Christian, tweet, 10.16 a.m., 4 May 2021, https://twitter.com/terrychristian/status/1389509343222157312 6 Dan O’Hagan, tweet, 7.07 a.m., 7 May 2021, https://twitter.com/danohagan/status/1390548709537157121; Alex Green, tweet, 9.12 a.m., 7 May 2021, https://twitter.com/GlexAreen/status/1390580177378463745 CHAPTER ONE THE POLITICAL MARGINALISATION OF THE WORKING CLASS ‘These fat old racists won’t stop blaming the EU when their sh*t hits the fan … Absolute sh*tbag racist w*nkers.’

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Little wonder that a group of rank-and-file trade unionists have condemned their union leadership for ‘an obsession to run the Labour Party – rather than represent the millions of workers who pay their subs into [the Unite general secretary’s] union’s bank account’.23 This leftward shift has put trade union leadership at odds with the views of existing members, never mind the views of potential members. Almost 40 per cent of Unite members voted Conservative at the 2019 general election despite Unite being an architect of Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing political strategy. Only 12 per cent of the union’s members even voted in the last election for general secretary, illustrating how disengaged union members have become from the politics of its leadership. This deviation between union leaders and far-left activists is by no means a new thing.

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

Putting the actual content aside, it is the same approach that Arctic Monkeys took to propel them to the top of the UK charts seemingly from nowhere, that Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger employed to build Instagram from a start-up to billionaire buy-out in under two years, and Simon Mottram used to create the phenomenon that is Rapha. It is also the approach that was employed by Jeremy Corbyn when he shook the UK political establishment to the core in the 2017 General Election – so it has nothing to do with political affiliations; Corbyn could not be further away from Trump in personality or political leanings. Crucially, as the hierarchical command-and-control model of leadership and organisation breaks down, it is the approach that is being used by the high-growth start-ups, disruptors and platform businesses that is changing the way the world works.

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“We are all in this together,” John would say. When I was with Putri and her friends as they played with Instagram in Indonesia. the word they used was ‘we’. We. Together. Us. ‘We’ was highly noticable when I spent time with Labour activists in the UK election in 2017 – when a movement whose leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was supposed to be unelectable, and, like Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, seemed to have the whole of the media against it, shook the political establishment to the core. It is hidden in plain sight in the name of WeWork. Neil Papworth’s simple Christmas hello message in 1992 may be one of the biggest gifts that has even been given to society – the means for people to deeply, authentically, and intimately connect with each other, to build communities of which they feel part. 3.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

Besides these videogames about work, there are other examples of politically themed videogames. In the US there have been many variants of anti–Donald Trump games, like Punch the Trump. In the UK, a videogame called Corbyn Run was released to support the Labour Party, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, in the 2017 election. The player takes on the role of a pixelated Jeremy Corbyn, running after the then prime minister Theresa May and another Conservative politician. There is a battle bus labeled “Lies,” referencing the additional money that the Brexit campaign leaders promised for the National Health Service and failed to deliver, as well as the ghost of Margaret Thatcher.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

When Uber’s licence was again withdrawn in 2019, the Tory mayoral candidate, Shaun Bailey, was just one of the Conservatives to attack Khan, saying he was ‘going after Uber to be popular’.29 The Conservative-supporting right-wing Daily Telegraph was sufficiently exercised to write a leader article, editorializing that Khan’s was an ‘ideological clampdown on Uber’ and a ‘harbinger’ of what a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn would be like: ‘insular, over-regulated, resistant to innovation, protective of vested interests and closed to global investment’.30 If you listen closely enough, you can just about hear Margaret Thatcher turning in her grave. The reason she abolished the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1986 was precisely to remove power over London and its economy from ‘socialist’ Labour upstarts – in the GLC’s case its leader, Ken Livingstone.

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Those ‘who own nothing’, to use Davies’s terms, have, as Mann says, ‘nothing to lose’.17 The wonder, rather, is that the UK’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, having described the EU membership referendum as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime chance to vote for real change’, has, for all his impeccable Etonian and Oxbridge establishment credentials, managed to persuade people that support for him, as for Brexit, represents opposition to the establishment and the status quo – all the while that Jeremy Corbyn, the politician offering real change and Johnson’s vanquished rival in the 2019 general election, has been pilloried in Leave-voting regions as a representative of the ‘metropolitan elite’ liberal establishment. Thus, if there really is an ‘alliance’ in support of Brexit that we can usefully understand in terms of rentier capitalism, it is much more paradoxical than the one to which Davies refers.

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George Monbiot is thus wholly correct to insist that, in the UK, ‘the right will never break the power of patrimonial wealth, because the right exists to defend it’.75 The political movement to move the UK beyond rentierism must therefore come from the Left, which, Monbiot maintains, exists (‘when it remembers what it’s for’) to ‘confront’ patrimonialism.76 In this regard, there have been eminently hopeful signs from the current opposition. Under Jeremy Corbyn, its leader since 2015, Labour has been talking about plans for transformations in taxation, investment and ownership that align closely with those described above, and that derive from broadly similar concerns.77 Under existing policy proposals, a Labour government would, for example, aim to renationalize, at a minimum, water, energy and rail services, as well as to rebuild the UK’s denuded stock of public land by using revised compulsory purchase laws to enable the public sector to acquire sites from private owners at closer to existing-use value than is currently possible.78 A Labour government would also seek to instigate a ‘radically different approach to taxation’, one focused specifically on rentier wealth, including – through land-value taxation – rentier property wealth.79 And a Labour government would work to provide the UK with its own Green New Deal; in 2018, it unveiled plans for a programme of investment and transformation designed to achieve a 60 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, while creating over 400,000 skilled jobs.80 All of this would be undertaken with a view to reducing inequality and poverty, and especially dishonourable poverty, ‘shifting the balance of power back towards workers [to] achieve decent wages, security and dignity at work’, and treating those out of work with the ‘dignity and respect’ they have been denied by governments of the Right.81 On the other hand, though it would give workers a voice on the CMA and other public bodies, Labour has no substantive plans for the fourth pillar of anti-rentierist political-economic transformation I outlined earlier – competition policy.

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response by Tony Connelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, land bank, LNG terminal, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, personalized medicine, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, tech worker, éminence grise

Boris Johnson had been expected to stand for the leadership, but pulled out at the last minute when he learned that his ally, Michael Gove, was about to launch his own bid. Stephen Crabb, the Work and Pensions Secretary, dropped out of the race due to lack of support and within days was embroiled in a ‘sexting’ scandal. With the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, clinging to office after a dismal referendum campaign and the financial markets in free fall, the country appeared in amateurish disarray. The Economist’s front cover showed a pair of Union Jack underpants halfway up a flagpole, under the headline ‘Anarchy in the UK’. The antics at Westminster were viewed with increasing alarm in the rest of Europe, and in Dublin.

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‘The EU side want them to be clear and organized and businesslike. The main motivation now is to get this bloody thing dealt with. It’s going to become adversarial from now on.’ Over seven weeks, May’s lead was whittled down by a poor campaign, a robotic style and a surprisingly good performance by the Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn. By the morning of 9 June, it was clear that her gamble had spectacularly backfired. Rather than extending her majority of 17, the Conservatives had lost 13 seats, and Labour gained 30. Britain was once again in turmoil. Facing a hung parliament with just 318 seats, the Tories turned to a party at the very centre of Ireland’s Brexit concerns.

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There was also a ‘commitment’ that London would match the EU cash payments to Northern Irish farmers under the CAP for the lifetime of the parliament. Both parties made it clear the agreement would not be subject to the Barnett Formula, a convention that held that any funding increases in one part of the UK would be matched in other parts. Jeremy Corbyn said it was ‘not in the national interest but in May’s party’s interest to help her cling to power’, while the outgoing Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, described it as a ‘shoddy little deal’ and added: ‘While our schools are crumbling and our NHS is in crisis, Theresa May chooses to throw cash at 10 MPs in a grubby attempt to keep her Cabinet squatting in Number 10.’

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

During that period, it felt at times as though the country was, at once, imploding and exploding. While some British people saw their dream – independence from Eurocracy – realised, others felt that just over half of the country had voted for something they did not want but would have to live with. The Labour Party, beleaguered and led by Jeremy Corbyn (and subsequently Keir Starmer), struggled. The Conservatives, led by David Cameron, then Theresa May, then Boris Johnson, fought among themselves and yet continued not only to win elections, but win big. In the early hours of 13 December 2019, Johnson declared victory in an election which delivered the Conservatives their biggest majority since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 win and the largest overall majority since Tony Blair’s landslide in 2001.

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Landlords make money from their buy-to-lets and so the onus should be on them to foot these running costs. I was not sure what to expect as I waited for Hollinrake. I sipped the tea and tried to understand his position. The time gave me the opportunity to re-read his biography on my phone. He was then – he is now – on the face of it, one of the ‘few’ who made up former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘many not the few’. And yet his own story is complex. The son of a milkman and a social worker, Hollinrake went to a state comprehensive school, Easingwold in North Yorkshire, which has since been turned into an academy. After that he went to Sheffield Hallam University (then a polytechnic), where he studied physics.

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Once these recognitions are not only made but internalised, you can lobby politicians and vote for those who genuinely want to challenge and change the status quo. That might mean not always voting in your own interests. We know that change occurs when there is political will. Coronavirus has shown us that. The Overton Window shifts, the needle moves. We may yet find the ‘radical’ ideas of the former leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn – a four-day working week, nationalised universal broadband – adopted by the centre right. Stranger things have happened. We have already seen an iteration of Universal Basic Income – it was called the furlough scheme. Under crisis, the politically impossible can very quickly become possible. The progressive can be conservative when it is necessary and politically expedient.

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

‘Most of the properties in the most expensive part of the avenue’, it found, ‘are registered to companies in tax havens.’3 ‘[T]he global super rich’, thundered Labour MP Tessa Jowell the following year, ‘buy London homes like they are gold bars as assets to appreciate, rather than homes in which to live’.4 The existence in London of large numbers of such unoccupied or under-occupied properties took on a sickening quality in June 2017, in the wake of the appalling fire at Grenfell Tower. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour opposition leader, and others called on the government – without success – to requisition empty homes in the borough of Kensington in order to rehouse victims of the fire locally.1 By the terms that the government applies to public land, these and other unoccupied British homes are very much ‘surplus’, not being in use (except of course to store and accumulate wealth).

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The party’s April 2018 Green Paper on housing pledged that a Labour government would ‘end the “fire sale” of public land with no obligation to secure new genuinely affordable homes and ensure that new housing developments on public land include an appropriate amount of affordable housing’.1 But not only is ‘affordable’, as we have seen, an ambiguous and slippery concept; so too is the notion of ‘an appropriate amount’. As such, this ‘pledge’ is something of an empty vessel; it also assumes that the sale of public land is always justifiable if affordable housing is built on it, which is by no means unarguable. The only other recent statement of note is Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s comment to community activists in North London that he would like to reintroduce a meaningful right of first refusal for local authorities on land being sold by other public bodies. Alluding to the rights that were conferred by the Redundant Lands and Accommodation procedure – he is one of a dwindling number of sitting MPs in a position to still remember – prior to its termination in 1979 (see Chapter 4), Corbyn said: ‘I want to bring back that power.

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Booth, ‘Inside “Billionaires Row”: London’s Rotting, Derelict Mansions Worth £350m’, Guardian, 31 January 2014. 4 T. Jowell, ‘Housing in London Is Unfair When the Rich Buy Homes Like Gold Bars and Hundreds of Thousands Are on Housing Waiting Lists’, Independent, 20 January 2015. 1 A. Cowburn, ‘Grenfell Tower Fire: Jeremy Corbyn Suggests Using Empty Kensington Properties for Victims’, Independent, 15 June 2017. 2 The only action that the government has taken has been to enable local authorities since April 2013 to charge an ‘empty homes premium’ of up to 50 per cent of the Council Tax on vacant properties – increased to up to 100 per cent in November 2017’s budget (although at the time of this writing this increase remains only a proposal insofar as a legislative amendment is still required to enact it).

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

However, if it is considered along with its Brexit-supporting allies (the Conservative Party, UKIP [UK Independence Party], and the Unionist Parties in Northern Ireland, all of which are to the right of mainstream European conservatives), then the Brexit cause had a combined loss of eleven seats in the European Parliament, or a massive 15 percent of total representation out of the seventy-three U.K. seats.45 The twenty-nine new MEPs (members of the European Parliament) of the U.K. Brexit Party found themselves in limbo, unable to find any allies in the European Parliament with whom to work: first they were a tragedy, and now they are a farce. Immediate commentary on political events quickly dates. By the time you read this, Jeremy Corbyn will certainly no longer be U.K. Labour Party leader. And if you live outside of the United Kingdom you may not have heard of him. If so, imagine that Bernie Sanders had become the U.S. Democratic Party presidential nominee. In the United Kingdom in 2017 this was said by political progressive outriders who supported Corbyn, whose unexpected electoral success denied the Conservatives a working majority: “Let’s face it, we’ve all been on a high but looking at the shifting Overton window shows that we’ve been hallucinating new possibilities into existence.

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(Data from a data set constructed by the author from many records, most recently of the Electoral Commission. See https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=3061.) How did London, or at least a substantial number of Londoners, react to the recent rise of radicalism in the British Labour Party and the message of its leader Jeremy Corbyn in particular? We are lucky in the United Kingdom—we can go back to at least 1835 to consider voting trends, in this case in general elections. London in 1835 was anti-Conservative. The Whigs (who later became Liberals) secured proportionately more votes in London than they did in the country as a whole.

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The Whigs (who later became Liberals) secured proportionately more votes in London than they did in the country as a whole. After 1865, when Lord Palmerston won for the Liberals nationally, London began to swing toward the landed interest of the Tories. Palmerston was a warmonger, among much else. London then remained relatively pro-Tory, as shown in figure 59, until at least 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party. It was clear then that Londoners had become radical again. The radicalization began a little earlier when, against the wishes of the then Labour leadership, Ken Livingstone became the first radical London mayor in the year 2000. THE TRANSFORMATION OF A SPECIES The Anthropocene is not the end of our world.

Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain's Battle With Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott

Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, gig economy, global pandemic, high-speed rail, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, lockdown, nudge unit, open economy, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Skype, social distancing, zoonotic diseases

Nonetheless, the next day Johnson was still missing when Cobra, the key national emergency committee, met to discuss the response to the crisis for a third time. There was no obvious reason for his absence as he was again in Westminster that day holding meetings with ministers and sparring with Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, during Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons. That afternoon he attended a video-linked Facebook Live event with members of the public, which took place in Downing Street just metres away from the Cobra summit rooms. It was a chance for Johnson to rattle on about Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare, whose portraits lined the walls around him in the Pillared Room.

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Five people had been killed, 400 homes were underwater, and hundreds of people were being evacuated. But water levels were still rising, threatening thousands more people’s homes. He was an easy target for the opposition, who questioned why he was refusing to quit his working break to take personal charge of the crisis or even to visit the affected areas. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said: ‘In refusing to visit flood-hit communities, nowhere-to-be-seen Boris Johnson is showing his true colours by his absence.’ He went on: ‘Failing to convene Cobra to support flood-hit communities sends a very clear message: if the prime minister is not campaigning for votes in a general election he simply does not care about helping communities affected by flooding.’

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It was optimistic of Johnson to believe that he would be able to recover in time, but the letter was sent anyway as a political manoeuvre. That morning the results of the Labour Party leadership contest were announced and Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions, was elected leader. The sharp lawyer was much more of a challenge to Johnson than his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn and the prime minister’s advisers felt it would be good to try to keep him onside with the government’s coronavirus policy. It was hoped that the call for unity in a national emergency might make the political jousting a little less torrid for Johnson when the Commons returned at the end of the month.

Basic Income And The Left by henningmeyer

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, eurozone crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, land value tax, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, precariat, quantitative easing, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, the market place, Tobin tax, universal basic income

Second, technological developments imply that the number of jobs will be significantly reduced, Broad Constituency Of Support Lined up behind the idea are a large number of internationally renowned political philosophers, but also sections of many Green and left-wing political parties in Europe as well as a not insignificant number of internationally prominent politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and, surprisingly, several high profile IT entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The proposals about the size of this unconditional universal basic income vary, but if it is going to be at all possible to live on this income, suggestions of around £800 per month have been put forward: what you can get from a student loan to pay for living expenses .

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Such cryptocurrency schemes are in their infancy, and it is far too early to say whether they have a significant role to play as a secondary basic income scheme. But they should be watched with interest. In the Air Elsewhere By late 2016, political parties and movements in several countries were proposing basic income pilots. In Britain, following Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election as leader of the Labour Party, John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced at the 2016 party conference that Labour would consider advocating a basic income in its manifesto for the 2020 general election, with the proposal of a pilot as a first step. In Scotland, the governing Scottish National Party passed a motion supporting basic income, and councillors in Fife and Glasgow are discussing local pilots.

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These include the British and New Zealand Labour Parties, the Scottish National Party, the Greens in most countries, including Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United States, and the Pirate parties where they exist, most notably Iceland. In Britain, although the Conservatives have shown no interest, both Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, and Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, favour piloting the idea, as does Ed Miliband, Corbyn’s predecessor as leader. Canada’s governing Liberal Party has put basic income into its policy platform, and several provincial premiers have come out in support. As noted earlier, Finland’s Prime Minister has put money aside for a pilot in his country.

Nine Crises: Fifty Years of Covering the British Economy From Devaluation to Brexit by William Keegan

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, congestion charging, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, gig economy, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, Just-in-time delivery, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, transaction costs, tulip mania, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

In fact, the former leader had long since repudiated his 1983 stance and become a passionate European, along with his successors Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (although it has to be admitted that Gordon went out of his way as Chancellor, when fighting his corner in Brussels, to disguise his pro-Europeanism). Yet, once again, when Cameron called the referendum that did not bring peace and quiet to the Tory ranks, a strain of Euroscepticism resurfaced in the Labour Party. And, unfortunately for the pro-European cause, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s support for Remain was lukewarm at best, with many long-time students of his career maintaining that he was and remained a Eurosceptic. Certainly, unlike Labour politicians in 1975, Corbyn declined to share a Remain platform with Conservative pro-Remainers. And according to one well-informed report, shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has explained that he and Corbyn found it impossible to throw their hearts into the 2016 Remain campaign, not because they saw the EU as a capitalist club but because they did not want to be seen as an ‘establishment cabal’.

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What I learned from Sharpe’s bulletins was that far more bets were being placed on Leave. This seemed to indicate the way the ‘non-elite’ were thinking, and it turned out they were right. Towards the end of the referendum campaign, there was panic in the ranks. I recall being telephoned by someone close to Cameron requesting the telephone number of Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s powerful press chief and close adviser – a former colleague at the Guardian/Observer. Cameron needed help. But it has to be said that there did not seem to be much coming from the Labour side. Cameron’s luck had run out. Back to the Greek classics of my youth: arrogance followed by hubris. And, unfortunately, the rest of us were landed with the result.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Emma Duncan, later deputy editor, recalled that Neil almost got her fired when she started at the paper in the early 1980s – ‘furious’ that she had failed to produce a piece that ‘said that every truck and every car in the British rail network ought to be sold off in one go’. Remarkably, Seumas Milne – much later to serve as chief of staff for Jeremy Corbyn – was on staff at the same time. He recalled editorial meetings between 1981 and 1984 in which Beedham expressed ‘suspicion of monetarism, neo-liberalism and the like’ because he ‘wanted the working class to stay strong and contented, if only to fight the Cold War’. But the most vocal critic of Thatcher at editorial meetings was Simon Jenkins, hired by Knight as the Economist’s political editor in 1979 after the Evening Standard fired him.

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Not only did these timid gestures ‘risk chasing away the most enterprising, particularly the footloose global talent that London attracts’, they betrayed an ‘ill-founded faith in the wisdom of government’.136 When a sincere leftist emerged to lead Labour after the defeat Miliband duly suffered at the polls, the Economist was caught between disbelief and disdain. Lost in a ‘political time-warp’, Jeremy Corbyn had ‘nothing to offer but the exhausted, hollow formulas which his predecessors abandoned for the very good reason that they failed’ – dooming Labour to ‘electoral oblivion’ until the day he quit, which was sure to be soon.137 Across the Atlantic, America looked more inspiring than ever – or at least its outgoing president did; in October 2016, Obama became the first one to contribute a signed piece to the Economist, showing how complete was the ideological marriage between them, in which he warned of the dangers of populism, declared capitalism ‘the greatest driver of prosperity and opportunity the world has ever known’, and pitched the upcoming election as a choice to ‘retreat into old, closed-off economies or press forward, acknowledging the inequality that can come with globalisation while committing ourselves to making the global economy work better for all people’.138 As the curtain descended on Obama’s time in office, the Economist signed off on his last military adventure abroad, the orchestration of Saudi Arabia’s assault on Yemen.

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In Britain, it welcomed the 2017 snap election called by the new prime minister, Theresa May, to ‘strengthen her hand’ as savvy – freeing her to pursue a softer Brexit, and to annihilate Labour, which opinion polls showed her trouncing by over 20 points in April. In lockstep with the rest of the British media, it was certain that Jeremy Corbyn – ‘witless’, a ‘loony leftist’, ‘soft’ on Putin, Chávez and terrorism – would suffer a crushing defeat, making way for a sensible Labour leader in the mould of Tony Blair. That left it to guess at the scale of the impending rout: more like 1983, when Labour won only 209 seats under its leftwing leader Michael Foot, or 1935, when it held just 154?

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

This leads, in turn, to the success of previously fringe movements – Syriza in Greece, the Five Star Movement in Italy – and to the hijacking of mainstream parties. Think of Donald Trump’s success in securing the Republican nomination for the 2016 US presidential election against the wishes of the party establishment, or Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party leadership victory in 2015, much to the discomfort of many sitting Labour MPs. It may also lead to the increased influence of fringe movements on mainstream political choices. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that David Cameron and his fellow Conservatives would have held a vote on the UK’s EU membership in June 2016 had it not been for the earlier rise of the UK Independence Party, its success based on its anti-EU and anti-immigration stance.

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POPULISTS AND RENEGADES Some argue that the problem represents no more than a growing divide between the traditional right and left. Yet a simple ‘right/left’ narrative does not work terribly well. Those on the left argue that the right thrives by exploiting divisions in society, yet the left itself is divided between those who support globalization (Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair) and those who do not (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn).2 Meanwhile, those on the right too often misinterpret economic arguments in order to push their ‘free-market’ agendas. Ricardian comparative advantage, for example, works a lot less well in the modern era: contemporary globalization is driven more by the heightened cross-border movement of capital and labour than by trade flows.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

So it appears also in struggles for racial justice; the Movement for Black Lives, for instance, uses cognates of cooperative forty-two times in the Economic Justice portion of its official platform, which insists on “collective ownership” of the economy, “not merely access.” Upstart politicians, such as Jeremy Corbyn of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party and Bernie Sanders in the United States, have put co-ops in their platforms as well.19 This isn’t new. The Scandinavian social democracies grew from the root of widespread co-ops and folk schools. The US civil rights struggle of the 1960s mobilized the self-sufficiency black farmers had already built through their co-ops.

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After Austin, Texas, required Uber and Lyft drivers to perform standard safety screenings, the companies pulled their services from the city in May 2015, and the city council aided in the formation of a new co-op taxi company and a nonprofit ride-sharing app; the replacements worked so well that Uber and Lyft paid millions of dollars in lobbying to force their way back before Austin became an example. Meanwhile, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a “Digital Democracy Manifesto” that included “platform cooperatives” among its eight planks.26 The challenge of such digital democracy goes beyond local tweaks. So must co-ops. When a platform serves the role of organizing and enabling the transactions throughout an entire sector of the economy, it should be regarded as a public service.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

We took the denial route. There was no wholesale appraisal of how we failed to do the one job we were tasked to do – report and explain the facts, as opposed to echoing back industry and political class conventional wisdom. The same thing happened in the British general election of 2017, when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was derided by almost all mainstream pundits and columnists, only to perform wildly better than expected at the ballot box and rob the government of its majority. A few mea culpas were issued but, all in all, nothing changed. This is the norm, the myth of the reliable narrator. Plagiarism and falsification are red lines, but gullibility and lapses in moral judgement are par for the course.

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Friedman, ‘Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at Last’ (New York Times, 23 November 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-arab-spring.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 211 ‘The political class imparted as much to the media class’: Gary Younge, ‘We were told Corbyn was “unelectable”. Then came the surge’ (Guardian, 6 June 2017), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/06/jeremy-corbyn-unelectable-political-climate [accessed on 25 July 2019] 211 ‘… one of the most exclusive middle-class professions’: Patrick Wintour, ‘Student fees for those who live at home should be axed – report’ (Guardian, 19 July 2009), https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jul/19/fees-home-students-axed [accessed on 25 July 2019] 211 ‘2016 research by the American Society of News Editors’: ASNE, ‘Table 0 – Employees By Minority Group’, https://www.asne.org/content.asp?

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

Something as simple as Medicare for All, which has been on the books for decades in Canada—where it’s so popular that even conservative politicians have to at least pretend to support it—can do a lot to alleviate this unfreedom. Similar considerations apply to programs ranging from tuition-free public college to state-sponsored childcare schemes to reducing the workweek to 3 or 4 days. The recent reemergence of social movements around the world, from Haiti to Lebanon, Chile to Sudan and the noble effort of Jeremy Corbyn and the powerful force and potential election of Bernie Sanders to the presidency, attests to the widespread appeal of this vision. It’s important to emphasize, though, that while social democracy is an immensely valuable step in the right direction—especially in a world ravaged by decades of neoliberalism and US-led militarism—for two reasons it ultimately won’t be enough.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

De-Baathification produced anarchy. The opposition to the invasion proved remarkably tenacious. The democratization of Iraq released ethnic tensions that, however brutally, had been held in check by Saddam Hussein. In Britain, this disaster turned centrist Tony Blair’s reputation toxic and transformed Jeremy Corbyn from a marginal crank into the leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. In America, the Iraq debacle helped to promote both the Democratic left and the nationalist right, energizing Bernie Sanders’s campaign, embarrassing Hillary Clinton’s and empowering the Trumpists. For all their faults, the neoconservatives had been the flagbearers of both intellectualism and global engagement in the Republican Party.

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All these scandals had one thing in common: they involved clever and well-connected people rigging the system for their own narrow benefit. THE ROOTS OF RAGE There is no doubting the force of the revolt against the cognitive elite. Hatred of ‘smarty-pants’ has trumped other forms of resentment, including class resentment. Cultural populism has trumped economic populism. Jeremy Corbyn, who tried to direct the fires of populism against the moneyed elite, is now on the backbenches. Boris Johnson, who directed it against the meritocratic elite, is in Downing Street. What lies behind all this fury? Most obviously, marginalization. One way to understand recent history is to think of a queue for coffee: you are heading to Starbucks in the morning, desperate for a cup of regular coffee before you start laying bricks, when a young person in LuluLemon yoga clothes cuts in front of you and orders a skinny no-foam extra-shot latte made with almond milk – for twenty people.

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Governments should generally avoid referenda, but if they must use them, they should apply very stringent criteria for passing far-reaching changes: Britain’s recent history would be very different if David Cameron had demanded a super-majority or instituted a two-stage process. Parties should wrest control from their members and hand it back to representatives who have to take into account broad constituencies rather than just the opinions of ideological activists: the British Labour Party would have escaped the nightmare of Jeremy Corbyn’s failed leadership, and might well be in power today, if members hadn’t been given the final say in choosing a leader. America should learn from Sweden’s example in finding wise men and women who can draw up plans to sort out its entitlement problem free from the hurly-burly of day-to-day politics.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

We play into their hands if we ourselves say there are no choices and use that as a rationale for not joining political parties. We must assert that there is and always will be a realistic and desirable alternative. Sierakowski and others believe it is impossible to transform existing parties from within. What happens to the British Labour Party will be an interesting test. Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in the leadership election in September 2015, based largely on his appeal to the precariat, was mould-breaking; it put an end to New Labour as a realistic project. But infighting may dissipate energies and lead to electoral wilderness. As with all social democratic parties, Labour is trapped by its history.

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Garzarelli, ‘Central banks have safer options than a helicopter drop’, Financial Times, 27 April 2016. 19 M. Blyth and E. Lonergan, ‘Print less but transfer more: Why central banks should give money directly to the people’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014. 20 This is a point made by other economists, such as Anatole Kaletsky. It is also consistent with Jeremy Corbyn’s notion of QE for People, although he favours using the money for public infrastructure, which would not have as good distributional effects. 21 J. Sutter, ‘The argument for a basic income’, CNN Opinion, 10 March 2015. 22 S. Davala, R. Jhabvala, S. K. Mehta and G. Standing, Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (London and New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2015). 23 Atkinson, 2015, op. cit., p. 219

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Alienation from the political mainstream today is resulting in strong support for far-left parties and candidates among youth in various high-income countries.44 In France’s presidential election of 2017, the former Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon won the under-24 vote, beating the more youthful Emmanuel Macron by almost two to one among that age group.45 In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party under the neo-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn in 2018 won more than 60 percent of the under-40 vote, while the Conservatives got just 23 percent.46 He won the youth vote similarly in 2020, even amidst a crushing electoral defeat. In Germany, the Green Party enjoys wide support among the young.47 A movement toward hard-left politics, particularly among the young, is also apparent in the United States, which historically has not been fertile ground for Marxism.48 In the 2016 primaries, the openly socialist Bernie Sanders easily outpolled Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined among under-30 voters.49 He also did very well among young people and Latinos in the early 2020 primaries, even as other elements of the Democratic Party rejected him decisively.50 Support for socialism, long anathema in America, has gained currency in the new generation.

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srnd=premium. 44 “Socialism ‘More Popular Than Capitalism’ With Brits, Germans, US Youth,” Sputnik News, February 24, 2016, https://sputniknews.com/europe/201602241035283984-socialism-popularity-britain-germany/. 45 Marco Damiani, “The transformation of Jean-Luc Mélenchon: From radical outsider to populist leader,” London School of Economics and Political Science, April 22, 2017, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/04/22/the-transformation-of-jean-luc-melenchon/. 46 Lucy Pasha-Robinson, “Election 2017: 61.5 per cent of under-40s voted for Labour, new poll finds,” Independent, June 14, 2017, https://www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-2017-labour-youth-vote-under-40s-jeremy-corbyn-yougov-poll-a7789151.html; Jim Edwards, “Bernie Sanders and the youth vote: Stats and history suggest he may doom the Democrats,” Business Insider, March 4, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bernie-sanders-reliance-on-youth-vote-could-doom-democrats-2020-3. 47 Ben Knight, “Why the German urban middle class is going Green,” New Statesman, July 17, 2019, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2019/07/why-german-urban-middle-class-going-green. 48 Sohrab Ahmari, “Making the World Safe for Communism—Again,” Commentary, October 18, 2017, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/making-the-world-safe-for-communism-again/. 49 “More young people voted for Bernie Sanders than Trump and Clinton combined,” Washington Post, June 20, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/20/more-young-people-voted-for-bernie-sanders-than-trump-and-clinton-combined-by-a-lot/?

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, Burning Man, centre right, COVID-19, disinformation, epigenetics, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial engineering, George Floyd, haute couture, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, post-work, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

After thousands of conversations with highly educated people, I have come to realize that most don’t know what this word actually means, or when and why it came to be. That’s what we’re here for! In light of the rise in antisemitism in the United Kingdom at the time of the Labor Party’s five-year leadership under Jeremy Corbyn, Jonathan Freedland wrote a piece in the Guardian titled: “Jews Are the Canary in the Coalmine.” This expression dates back to the early 1900s, when coal miners would take canaries down into the tunnels with them as real-life carbon monoxide detectors. If the gas levels killed the canaries, the miners had early warning to abandon the tunnels ASAP.

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It’s a politically correct, highly sympathetic message, which is likely why the movement has gained support from some members of the US House of Representatives, including Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Not to mention former British Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn. In only about fifteen years or so, BDS managed to become pretty successful in altering the conversation about Israel, infiltrating liberal circles, and becoming a hip extracurricular activity for my friends in the woke crowd. BDS has had incredible success reaching young Americans, who then become extremely active on college campuses and later on, in all walks of life, convincing those young Americans (and Roger Waters) that they are only after justice for all.

Among the Mosques: A Journey Across Muslim Britain by Ed Husain

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, Jeremy Corbyn, Khyber Pass, Mark Zuckerberg, Ronald Reagan, Shamima Begum

Something called the ‘Muslim Council of Britain’ seeks to be the face of this community and act as an intermediary with government. All too often these communal standards are enforced on those who wish to dissent, through social and family pressure, and sometimes through intimidation and violence. In the 2019 election, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party courted the vote of ‘the Muslim community’ because it was potentially five million-strong, and its ‘community leaders’ were seen as capable of controlling the election result in more than thirty constituencies. For many party strategists, the historical model of a secular state composed of individual British citizens who can lobby their parliamentary representatives on a range of causes is not politically advantageous.

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In 2018 and 2019, Ofcom again ruled that the broadcaster failed to comply with rules (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/bulletins/content-sanctions-adjudications/decision-islam-channel-limited). See Quilliam Foundation’s report Re-Programming British Muslims: A Study of the Islam Channel (2010) for further information. Between 2013 and 2015, Jeremy Corbyn made numerous appearances on the channel, and was the keynote speaker at one of its Gala dinners in 2019 (https://order-order.com/2019/12/03/corbyn-2019-keynote-speaker-islam-channel-censured-antisemitism-advocating-marital-rape/) 2Warren Dockter, Churchill and the Islamic world: Orientalism, Empire and Diplomacy in the Middle East, I.

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate raider, deindustrialization, European colonialism, global village, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Parkinson's law, trade route

That is what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did in 2016 when he apologized on behalf of Canada for the actions of his country’s authorities a century earlier in denying permission for the Indian immigrants on the Komagata Maru to land in Vancouver, thereby sending many of them to their deaths. Trudeau’s Willy Brandt moment needs to find its British echo. Indeed, the best form of atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested, to start teaching unromanticized colonial history in British schools. The British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples. These days there appears to be a return in England to yearning for the Raj: the success of the television series Indian Summers, building upon earlier Anglo-nostalgic productions like The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown, epitomize what the British-domiciled Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English ‘of their collective dreams of Englishness, so glorious, so poignant, so bittersweet in the resentful seediness of contemporary little England.’

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According to a recent UN Population Division report: ‘World Population Ageing 1950–2050’ report, United Nations, www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldageing19502050/pdf/90chapteriv.pdf. to start teaching unromanticized colonial history: Steven Swinford and Christopher Hope, ‘Children should be taught about suffering under the British Empire, Jeremy Corbyn says’, The Telegraph, 27 July 2015. what the British-domiciled Dutch writer Ian Buruma saw as an attempt to remind the English: Ian Buruma, Playing The Game, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991, p. 258. Buruma was, of course, echoing: Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, Granta, 1984, reproduced in Imaginary Homelands, New Delhi: Viking, 1993.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In the invasion of Ukraine, the main Russian victories were in the minds of Europeans and Americans, not on the battlefields. Far-Right politicians spread Russia’s messages, and left-wing journalists helped to bring them to the center. One of the left-wing journalists then entered the corridors of power. In October 2015, Seumas Milne, having chaired Putin’s Valdai summit, became chief of communications for Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. With Milne as his chief press officer, Corbyn proved a poor advocate for EU membership. British voters chose to leave, and Moscow celebrated. In July 2016, not long after the Brexit referendum, Donald Trump said, “Putin is not going into Ukraine, you can mark it down.”

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Guardian associate editor Seumas Milne Quotations: Seumas Milne, “In Ukraine, fascists, oligarchs and western expansion are at the heart of the crisis,” TG, Jan. 29, 2014; Seumas Milne, “It’s not Russia that’s Pushed Ukraine to the Brink of War,” TG, April 30, 2014. See also “Projecting the Kremlin line,” Left Foot Forward, March 15, 2015. Enormous amounts of time Stephen Bush, “Jeremy Corbyn appoints Seumas Milne as head of strategy and communications,” New Statesman, Oct. 20, 2015; Laura Kuenssberg, “Corbyn office ‘sabotaged’ EU Remain campaign—sources,” BBC, June 26, 2016. On Russia and Brexit, see the discussion in chapter 3. In July 2016 Trump quotation: Melissa Chan, “Donald Trump Says Vladimir Putin Won’t ‘Go Into Ukraine,’ ” Time, July 31, 2016.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Things beyond the bounds of what even the most progressive elements in mainstream politics have been willing to contemplate, even on their best days, over the past thirty years. The less bad news, he went on, is that a lot of things have happened over the past decade that weren’t meant to be possible. He listed the banking crash, the Arab Spring, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the election of Donald Trump. The point is not whether we would welcome these developments, whether they represent a move in the right direction, but what they tell us about the nature of the times in which we are living: these are times in which impossible things happen, things which all the sensible voices whose job it is to tell us how the world works were busy telling us couldn’t happen until they did, and in this there lies a dark vein of hope.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

(There was also some conflicting evidence, suggesting that Le Pen only outperformed her overall vote share among the young by a much smaller margin.)46 In this, France is hardly an exception. On the contrary, polls have found similar results in countries as varied as Austria, Sweden, Greece, Finland, and Hungary.47 Even in Great Britain and the United States, the picture is rather less clear-cut than widely portrayed. Jeremy Corbyn, long regarded as a fringe figure, ascended to the leadership of the Labour Party and outperformed expectations in the 2017 general election in part because of his fervent support among young voters.48 Young people are more open to populist appeals than has widely been suggested in the United States as well.

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See Carla Bleiker, “Young People Vote Far-Right in Europe,” Deutsche Welle, December 14, 2015, http://www.dw.com/en/young-people-vote-far-right-in-europe/a-18917193; Benjamin Reuter, “‘Right-Wing Hipsters’ Increasingly Powerful in Austria,” WorldPost, May 20, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/right-wing-hipsters-increasingly-powerful-in-austria_us_573e0e07e4b0646cbeec7a07; “Populism in Europe: Sweden,” Demos, February 23, 2012, https://www.demos.co.uk/project/populism-in-europe-sweden/; Alexandros Sakellariou, “Golden Dawn and Its Appeal to Greek Youth,” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, July 2015, http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/athen/11501.pdf; Veronika Czina, “The Rise of Extremism among the Youth of Europe: The Case of Hungary’s Jobbik Party,” Project for Democratic Union, November 29, 2013, http://www.democraticunion.eu/2013/11/popularity-extremism-among-youth-europe-case-hungarys-jobbik-party/; and Hillary Pilkington, “Are Young People Receptive to Populist and Radical Right Political Agendas?” MYPLACE Policy Forum, November 20, 2014, http://www.fp7-myplace.eu/documents/policy-forum/Policy%20Forum,%20Session%202%20presentation%20v.8.pdf. 48. Matthew Smith, “Theresa May Is Britain’s Most Popular Politician,” YouGov, August 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/10/jeremy-corbyn-youth-surge-votes-digital-activists. (Note, however, that later evidence suggests that the boost in youth turnout at the 2017 elections may have been significantly overstated in initial exit polls.) 49. Emma Fidel, “White People Voted to Elect Donald Trump,” Vice News, November 9, 2016, https://news.vice.com/story/white-people-voted-to-elect-donald-trump.

Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now?: The Facts About Britain's Bitter Divorce From Europe 2016 by Ian Dunt

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy security, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, open borders, Silicon Valley, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Add it to the Remain vote and you have no mandate to end the free movement of people. So even here, in the one measure which is treated as unarguable, there is no clear mandate. But regardless of its objective legitimacy, the immigration mandate was the most common interpretation of the Brexit vote. It was accepted by most MPs in the main parties (although not by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership team) and enthusiastically embraced by anti-immigration tabloids. It has become received wisdom that something must be done about freedom of movement. It is a non-negotiable ‘red line’. The consequence is that Britain either has to convince its EU partners to reform the rules on freedom of movement or leave the single market.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The middle classes ‘discovered’ allotments in the 1970s, when the BBC sitcom The Good Life popularised a new desire for self-sufficiency – and homemade wine – made suddenly urgent by the oil crisis, the three-day week and new-found fears of ecological collapse. Waiting lists lengthened hugely, as they did again three decades later when a fresh spike in oil prices, fears about climate change, and TV gardening programmes sparked a new drive for community gardens. Famously, of course, Jeremy Corbyn is a big fan of allotments. A Steve Bell cartoon depicts Corbyn out digging on his allotment in Islington. ‘Is this your allotment, mate?’ asks a passing journalist. ‘Well, it’s mine to work as I please,’ replies Corbyn, ‘but the land itself belongs to the wider community.’ ‘So it’s a communist plot, then?’

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almost 1.5 million Statistics cited in the Departmental Committee of Inquiry into Allotments (‘The Thorpe Report’) (October 1969), pp. 47–50. After the First World War, the number of allotment plots stood at 1,330,000 in 1920; during the Second, the number peaked in 1942 at 1,451,888. A Steve Bell cartoon Steve Bell’s If … cartoon strip, ‘Jedi Jeremy Corbyn gets down to earth’, Guardian, 25 January 2016. The 1908 Allotments Act For more on the complex legislation governing allotments, see this summary: https://www2.canterbury­.gov.uk/media­/892659­/The­-Law­-and-allotments-summary-Appendix-28.pdf; the House of Commons Library’s briefing on allotments, 21 March 2012, http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk­/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN00887­#fullreport­; National­ Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners’ webpage on the history of allotments, https://www.nsalg­.org.uk/allotment­-info­/brief­-history­-of-allotments/ 90,000 people https://www.nsalg­.org.uk/allotment­-info­/brief­-history­-of-allotments/; NSALG allotment waiting lists survey 2013, http://www.transitiontownwestkirby.org­.uk/files/ttwk_nsalg_survey_2013­.pdf­ Over 100,000 acres Departmental Committee of Inquiry into Allotments.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

They begged the question of power. If there was to be a new social contract, who would make it? There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amid the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment.

…

One obvious interpretation was that the monetization of giant stimulus spending was the belated and long overdue triumph of radical Keynesianism, a return to the logic of so-called functional finance first spelled out in World War II.55 The zealous new school of Modern Monetary Theory rode to prominence on the coattails of Bernie Sanders and his revival of the American left.56 In the UK, there was talk in the circles around Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party of “People’s QE” and radical experiments with helicopter money.57 If government spending, whether on welfare or tax cuts, was funded by issuing debt that was ultimately purchased by the central bank, why not cut out the financial sector and simply equip every citizen with a central bank account?

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

After the election, Cameron set the referendum for June of 2016. Cameron was confident that he could keep Britain within the EU. He and his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, joined by Britain’s top business leaders and major newspapers, warned repeatedly that a decision to leave the EU could have dire economic consequences. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn waged a halfhearted campaign for staying within the EU that probably failed to sway potential supporters among the “left-behinds” while further alienating what had once been Labour constituencies. UKIP led the campaign against the referendum along with two prominent Tories, former London Mayor Boris Johnson and former Cabinet member and MP Michael Gove.

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

What ideas there are tend back to the national state, and perhaps there is a reason for that. Consider that every time the system has a crash and reset, every time something really disrupts the system, the container of hopes becomes the nation state, for good or ill. When we sat together in London in the summer of 2016 we saw Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK’s Labour Party, giving a very weak-kneed defence of the EU during the Brexit campaign. The governing Conservatives had dealt themselves a post-Brexit political agenda that was all about taking back control – us against them – the national against the international. The 2019 British elections demonstrated this further, with both the major parties promising renewal centred around national control, although giving it quite different content (Brexit versus state ownership).

The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World by John Dickie

anti-communist, bank run, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, cuban missile crisis, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, Republic of Letters, Rosa Parks, South Sea Bubble, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, white flight, women in the workforce

Despite his lack of authority, and his book’s glaring shortcomings, The Brotherhood had a huge impact. As conspiracy theories began to circulate about Knight’s death, another journalist took up his work on Masonic scheming within the police. The same old refrain began: if the Freemasons are as innocent as they say, why all the secrecy? In June 1988, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party leader between 2015 and 2020 but then a back-bench MP, declared in parliament: Many of us are gravely suspicious about the influence of Freemasonry. I am utterly opposed to it and to the influence of other secret organisations because I believe them to be a deeply corrupting influence on society… Masonic influence is serious… Freemasonry is incompatible with being a police officer… I am suggesting that the power of a Masonic Lodge on any organisation is sinister and insidious.

…

Prima edizione in ‘Serie Bianca’, novembre 1996. Prima edizione in ‘Universale Economica’, ottobre 1998. Angelo Longo Editore for permission to quote from Giordano Gamberini, Attualità della Massoneria. Contenti gli operai, Ravenna, Longo, 1978. Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0 for Jeremy Corbyn’s speech in Parliament in June 1988, https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/copyright-parliament/open-parliament-licence/. The Koori Mail for permission to quote from an interview with a member of the Victoria Museum’s Indigenous Advisory Committee, in the article ‘Remains “are not trophies”’, Koori Mail, 13 November 2002.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Going to a couple of Tory get-togethers in north London, it also felt quite pleasant if a bit weird to be at a social event where everyone vaguely agreed with me politically; rather than being, not just the most Right-wing person in the room, but a freakish outlier. I got on well with some of the people but I’ve never felt being a Tory member a part of my identity, and couldn’t really understand the sentimental attachment the other side felt. During the Labour Party’s long meltdown following Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader, the emotional pain and anguish expressed by moderate members about their party were clearly heartfelt but to me just baffling. Some of the arguments people made for why they were staying in the party, because their great-grandfather joined it to fight for better wages in 1921 or something, just struck me as weird.

…

The downside of this is that once you have a solid moral community then you’re probably more likely to feel hostility towards the outgroup. For fervent religious believers it’s often the case that their entire life is dominated by the faith, and they tend to develop quite a sectarian attitude to non-members. Jeremy Corbyn reportedly once said that he could not be friends with someone who isn’t Left-wing, which for a potential prime minister struck me a red, flashing, warning light; a similar opinion has been voiced by a couple of Corbynite MPs. There is certainly asymmetry of hatred. When the Tory party met in Manchester during the 2010s people entering the arena had to go through a baying mob shouting ‘Tory scum’, the protestors’ faces contorted with hatred.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The early 2010s saw the election of several left-wing union leaders, including Len McCluskey, born in 1950, who failed his eleven-plus, became a dockworker, and in 2011 became leader of Unite – a successor of the TGWU and the second-largest trade union in Britain. Then, in 2015, the Labour Party held a leadership contest. Left-winger Jeremy Corbyn was the surprise winner, and Party membership rocketed to over half a million – making Labour the largest democratic party in Europe. Two years later, in the general election of 2017, Corbyn’s Labour Party defied all media predictions to destroy the Conservatives’ majority. Labour pledged to act ‘for the many, not the few’ by increasing public investment and treating education as a social benefit, not an individual choice or asset – notably by abolishing university tuition fees.

…

In 2010, Labour’s manifesto had mentioned ‘social mobility’ five times and ‘aspiration’ six times. In 2017 ‘social mobility’ did not appear in Labour’s manifesto and ‘aspiration’ only once, to describe a collective desire for secure homes which was used to justify plans to increase council housing. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party didn’t promise great riches, but instead collective uplift – ‘a fairer’ Britain where ‘we will measure our economic success not by the number of billionaires but by the ability of our people to live richer lives … the creation of wealth is a collective endeavour’.99 Labour achieved the biggest electoral swing to the Labour Party since Attlee’s landslide victory in 1945.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

In effect, the countries of the West are now in many senses ‘post-political spaces’ that are managed by apparatuses of various kinds. For many, this creates a haunting sense of loss that manifests itself in an ever-more-desperate yearning to recoup a genuinely participatory politics. This is in no small part the driving force behind such disparate figures as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, on the one hand, and Donald Trump, on the other. But the collapse of political alternatives, the accompanying disempowerment, and the ever-growing intrusion of the market have also produced responses of another kind—nihilistic forms of extremism that employ methods of spectacular violence.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Despite the persistent inequalities that stretch back to the Ancient World, there are nevertheless reasons for hope today, including the millions whose curiosity has been piqued by references to socialism by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential primary, and more recently by a series of contenders for political office across the United States. In the UK too, as of this writing, an unabashed socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, heads Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. As the political debate becomes more polarized, young people on the whole, even in the Anglo-American center of the capitalist order, now view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Across Europe, far-left parties that proffer a rhetoric that endorses socialism, or at least some other way of doing things than business-as-usual capitalism—from Syriza in Greece to Die Linke in Germany and Podemos in Spain—are chasing the traditional social democratic parties and in some places eclipsing them, albeit with a widely varying mixture of success.

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

Brexit did have a leader of choice – but he was too incompetent to actually effect the transfer of power that this revolutionary moment needed. It is hard to overstate the degree to which Boris Johnson was the single greatest asset for the Leave side in the referendum. He was personally popular, with an average likability rating in pre-referendum polling of 4.5 on the 0–10 scale compared to 4.2 for Jeremy Corbyn, 3.5 for David Cameron and only 3.2 for Nigel Farage. Andrew Cooper, chief pollster for the Remain campaign, admitted that ‘during the referendum campaign it was clear from all our tracking research that Boris was having a big impact. This came through clearly in the focus groups and in our (weekly, twice-weekly, then daily) polling, Boris invariably came top on the question of which politician has made the most persuasive impact…’16 More importantly, how people felt about Johnson was a very close predicter of how they would vote in the referendum: ‘Feelings about Johnson had very strong effects on the probability of casting a Leave ballot.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Though political parties often try to represent the interests of particular groups over time, it is also true that as the composition of the electorate shifts and new economic and societal issues arise, as do new political agendas. Politicians are autonomous actors who seek power by mobilizing voters through continuously shifting their agendas to reflect voters’ concerns, and one such concern these days is clearly automation. Consequently, in Britain, the leader of the Labor Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has pledged to tax robots to slow down the pace of automation, which he thinks threatens workers’ jobs.71 And in South Korea, President Moon Jae-in has already downsized tax breaks on investments into robotics and automation due to employment concerns.72 In America, Andrew Yang, who will make automation the key theme for his 2020 run for the White House, thinks it is hard to tax robots directly.

…

Factories Reach into the Future,” New York Times, March 13. 69. Quoted in G. Allison, 2017, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), chapter 1, Kindle. 70. P. Druckerman, 2014, “The French Do Buy Books. Real Books,” New York Times, July 9. 71. G. Rayner, 2017, “Jeremy Corbyn Plans to ‘Tax Robots’ Because Automation Is a ‘Threat’ to Workers,” Daily Telegraph, September 26. 72. Y. Sung-won, 2017, “Korea Takes First Step to Introduce ‘Robot Tax,’ ” Korea Times, August 7. 73. B. Merchant, 2018, “The Presidential Candidate Bent on Beating the Robot Apocalypse Will Give Two Americans a $1,000-per-month Basic Income,” Motherboard, April 19. 74.

The Joy of Tax by Richard Murphy

banking crisis, banks create money, carbon tax, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, full employment, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, green new deal, high net worth, Jeremy Corbyn, land value tax, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, offshore financial centre, price elasticity of demand, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, savings glut, seigniorage, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing

Richard created the country-by-country reporting concept for multinational companies and has been credited with creating much of the debate on tax gaps in the UK and Europe. He also defined the term ‘secrecy jurisdictions’, now widely used in debates on offshore taxation. He has been described as the architect of ‘Corbynomics’ as part of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the Labour Party leadership. Richard is joint author of Tax Havens – The True Story of Globalisation and sole author of The Courageous State. In 2015, he became Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London. Also by Richard Murphy TAX HAVENS: HOW GLOBALIZATION REALLY WORKS (with Ronen Palan and Christian Chavagneux) THE COURAGEOUS STATE OVER HERE AND UNDERTAXED: MULTINATIONALS, TAX AVOIDANCE AND YOU For more information on Richard Murphy and his books, see his website at www.taxresearch.org.uk TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS 61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA www.transworldbooks.co.uk Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers Copyright © Richard Murphy 2015 Richard Murphy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

The Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole

banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, full employment, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Suez crisis 1956, tech billionaire

Brexit did have a leader of choice – but he was too incompetent to actually effect the transfer of power that this revolutionary moment needed. It is hard to overstate the degree to which Boris Johnson was the single greatest asset for the Leave side in the referendum. He was personally popular, with an average likability rating in pre-referendum polling of 4.5 on the 0–10 scale compared to 4.2 for Jeremy Corbyn, 3.5 for David Cameron and only 3.2 for Nigel Farage. Andrew Cooper, chief pollster for the Remain campaign, admitted that ‘during the referendum campaign it was clear from all our tracking research that Boris was having a big impact. This came through clearly in the focus groups and in our (weekly, twice-weekly, then daily) polling, Boris invariably came top on the question of which politician has made the most persuasive impact…’16 More importantly, how people felt about Johnson was a very close predicter of how they would vote in the referendum: ‘Feelings about Johnson had very strong effects on the probability of casting a Leave ballot.

Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Extinction Rebellion, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, p-value, profit maximization, rent-seeking, rewilding, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks

Ross, “Nigel Farage: Migrants Could Pose Sex Attack Threat to Britain,” The Telegraph, June 4, 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/04/nigel-farage-migrants-could-pose-sex-attack-threat-to-britain/. 54. M. Dathan, “‘Brexit Campaigners Are EXTREMISTS!’ Labour’s EU Leader Alan Johnson Launches Extraordinary Attack on Vote Leave as Corbyn Launches the Party’s Red Battle Bus,” Daily Mail, May 10, 2016, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3582763/We-need-tent-protect-storm-soaked-embattled-Jeremy-Corbyn-mocks-Labour-critics-poor-election-results-launches-party-s-pro-EU-battle-bus-pouring-rain.html. 55. J. Daley, “Why Am I Considered a Bigot or an Idiot for Wanting Britain to Leave the EU?,” The Telegraph, March 5, 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/03/17/why-am-i-considered-a-bigot-or-an-idiot-for-wanting-britain-to-l/. 56.

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak by Rosie Wilby

Airbnb, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, fear of failure, George Santayana, Jeremy Corbyn, Kintsugi, lateral thinking, lockdown, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social contagion, social distancing, zero-sum game

She was so dedicated to this cause that she gave up her ‘child-bearing years’. Her long-term relationship suffered and ultimately ended because her primary focus was the ‘us against the world’ energy that she discovered with her colleagues. But then the Labour Party changed very rapidly in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn won a leadership election. Ayesha thought she would continue to work for the party, despite the changes. Yet she found herself being dumped, along with many others. Still sounding a little shaken by it, she says, ‘I am still a Labour Party member. But I was thinking at the time, “How can this happen?

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Free university education, for example, might seem like an unaffordable economic sacrifice, but if you were measuring the stock of wealth rather than the flow, all those additional educated people might look like an increase in your nation’s wealth, not a diminishment of its growth. The same goes for investing in infrastructure, say high-speed rail, in anticipation of future returns on investment. How one accounts for these things matters. In the US independent senator Bernie Sanders and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn, the opposition Labour leader, both want to increase public funding and scrap student fees. Their policies look less radical—and therefore more plausible—from a wealth-accounting perspective. The second reason for counting assets is that today’s actions have an impact on future generations. Recording today’s national income offers no help whatsoever when making intergenerational decisions.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

While the Troika would refuse to change their stance in the negotiations that followed, and the Greek government capitulated to their terms, a new reality had emerged: the corridors of power were no longer insulated from mass protest in the streets. In Britain, meanwhile, the Conservative Party won its first majority since 1992 as the right-wing UKIP attracted almost 4 million votes and the Scottish National Party took an astonishing forty seats from Labour in Scotland. A few months later, Jeremy Corbyn, who began his outsider bid at odds of 200–1, became Leader of the Labour Party – his supporters certain he could be powered by the same wave that had taken the likes of Syriza and Podemos so far in such a short space of time. It was 2016 which proved to be the decisive year, however, as a crisis that started eight years earlier found its most potent political expressions.

Imperial Legacies by Jeremy Black;

affirmative action, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

The following April, Churchill referred in a speech to the “regular, settled lines of English democratic development” underpinning the “free British Empire,”1 again without contradiction. As an imperial system, indeed, Britain was far less totalitarian than the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Ironically, when the Soviet Union collapsed, left-wing commentators safely at a distance, such as Jeremy Corbyn, then a markedly left-wing backbench Labour MP, and from 2015 the leader of Britain’s Labour party, regretted the damage done to the “anti-imperialist” cause, which is a richly and typically vague term, ready for the use of guilt by association. The criticisms visited on British imperialism are frequently ahistorical.

Home Grown by Joan Smith

autism spectrum disorder, Boris Johnson, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Columbine, Donald Trump, drone strike, G4S, ghost gun, Jeremy Corbyn, microaggression, no-fly zone, operational security, post-materialism, Shamima Begum, Skype

Nazir Afzal, then chief executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, wanted to put out a statement the following day, identifying it as a misogynistic attack, but he couldn’t get the agreement of his board. I was invited to talk about the bombing on Woman’s Hour, later in the same week, because the producers were puzzled by a widespread failure to connect it to ISIS’s well-known record of extreme misogyny. More than a year later, at the Labour Party conference in 2018, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest aides, Andrew Murray, linked the attack to ‘foreign policy’, claiming, ‘it has contributed to the environment in which these sort of atrocities continue to take place’.202 Murray, who is a former chair of the Stop the War Coalition, did not explain why the British government’s decision to take military action against Ramadan Abedi’s arch enemy, Colonel Gaddafi, had motivated his son to blow the limbs off young girls in the city that had given his family refuge.

The Knife's Edge by Stephen Westaby

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, dark triade / dark tetrad, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, presumed consent, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

Innovation, speculation, even the exploration of the planet and outer space – all depend on putting something you cherish on the line in the hope of greater rewards. Thus risk-taking is the world’s principal driver for progress, but it requires a particular character type, one defined by courage and daring, not reticence and prudence – Winston Churchill rather than Clement Attlee, Boris Johnson not Jeremy Corbyn. In 1925, when Henry Souttar first stuck a finger into the heart and tried to relieve mitral stenosis, it posed a risk to his reputation and livelihood. When Dwight Harken removed a piece of shrapnel from a soldier’s heart in the Cotswolds, it was a risk that went against all he’d learned from the medical textbooks of the day.

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

Mansions of established wisdom have gone down like slum clearance lately. Take the many astounding events in politics: the elections of relative outsiders Donald Trump in the US and Emmanuel Macron in France; or the rise of a populist political right in many parts of Europe. Or consider the UK’s Brexit referendum, or the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing Member of Parliament whose chances of the leadership of his party were rated zero by most observers, who then took firm control. Even democracy, some say, is suddenly in retreat.17 Political assumptions have fallen to the extent that one professor of politics wondered publicly if it was time she and colleagues tore up their lecture notes and started afresh.18 Then throw in economics and business, with their global banking and financial crises, deep recession, slow recovery and an enduring low-productivity puzzle in many OECD countries,19 plus a historically unprecedented stutter in the growth of average earnings in some leading economies – and all in all you have to wonder if this is a time for a large helping of what philosophers call epistemic humility (intellectual humble pie to the rest of us).

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine

"World Economic Forum" Davos, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, confounding variable, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, experimental economics, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeremy Corbyn, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, phenotype, publication bias, risk tolerance, seminal paper

The colour of gender stereotyping. British Journal of Psychology, 102(3), 598–614. Quoted on p. 610. 68. See Roberts, Y. (September 13, 2015). Yet again men hold power. Why can’t Labour change? The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/13/women-politics-power-labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn on September 14, 2015. INDEX Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text. Abramson, Paul, 66 adaptation: environment and, 186–87 evolution and, 184–88, 189 adaptation, human, 23, 98–99, 100, 180 developmental systems and, 186, 188–91 seen as fixed and typical, 188–90 social context and, 185–88 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 11 Adkins-Regan, Elizabeth, 128, 131–32, 135, 136, 138 adolescents, risk taking in, 165 adrenal glands, 134 African forest weaver birds, 95 aggression, 165 in females, 102–3, 132 as “masculine” trait, 102–3 testosterone and, 148 Ah-King, Malin, 44 Ahnesjö, Ingrid, 44 Akerlof, George, 159 androgen receptors, social information and expression, 142 androgens, 84, 85, 134, 181 social context and, 141, 143 Annis, Barbara, 18 Antechinus mouse, 41 “Ape That Thought It Was a Peacock, The” (Stewart-Williams and Thomas), 78–79 Arnold, Arthur, 89 aromatase, 136 Atlantic, 174 Attitude Interest Analysis Survey, 104 attractiveness, physical, mating strategies and, 71–72, 74, 75 Austen, Jane, 72 Australia, 126, 176, 192, 225n Austria, 125 Bair, Sheila, 152 Baker, Michael, Jr., 109–10 Balloon Analogue Risk Task, 157–58, 166, 244n Barnard College, 183 Bateman, Angus, 29, 31–32, 33–36, 39, 40, 42, 43, 48, 60, 61, 137, 177, 205n, 206n BBC Internet, 211n Beck, Glenn, 118 behavior: biosocial model of, 232n, 235n–36n flexibility in, 233n–34n hormones and, 133, 138–50 masculine-feminine polarity assumption in, 104–5 “masculine” vs.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. There are democratic potentials in the internet. Even if it is in essence a commercialized system of surveillance and controls, there have always been ways of writing against the grain. Radical movements, from Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the United States to the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party, have used professional social media campaigns to outflank and subvert the old media monopolies. Even in the People’s Republic of China, the spread of online communications technologies has created new enclaves outside of the state’s and companies’ control. While the regime harnesses computerization and big data to state surveillance and the disciplinary system of ‘social credit’, workers use popular social industry platforms such as QQ and Sina Weibo – Chinese equivalents of Facebook and Twitter – to organize walkouts, discuss strategies and collate demands.23 There may also be ways to fight the social industry, incrementally, for control of the social media platforms.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

By this, he meant not only that no new worldview had risen from the ashes of Communism to challenge the liberal democratic/capitalist consensus, but also that people increasingly didn’t even understand why anyone searched for alternatives to that consensus in the first place: “Try to convey the grand drama of political and intellectual life from 1789 to 1989 to young students today—American, European, even Chinese students—and you are left feeling like a blind poet singing of lost Atlantis.” That was five years ago; the question of our moment is whether his analysis still holds. Lilla wrote those words before Trump, before Brexit, before Jeremy Corbyn and Matteo Salvini, before China’s slide toward digital totalitarianism under Xi Jinping’s presidency-for-life, before it became commonplace to argue that the liberal order had entered into crisis. The consensus as I write is that this time may really be different—that unlike 2001 or 2008, the end of history might genuinely be over, that ideological alternatives are finally returning, that sterility and repetition is giving way to something at once more dangerous and more interesting, as the end of decadence would inevitably be.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

In the years since, the Right has veered away from its devotion to markets, instead espousing protectionism, subsidies, immigration controls, and cultural nationalism—ideas championed by Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, and other populists around the world. On the left, meanwhile, two trendsetters have been Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, both self-described “socialists.” They have been joined by energetic newcomers on the political scene such as New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who seems just as comfortable with the label. And in several polls, Americans between eighteen and twenty-nine show significantly higher support for socialism than their elders.

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

On the same day, one million students from all around the world took part in an international school strike to protest politicians’ inaction over climate change. Two thousand protests took place in 125 countries, with students from all corners of the globe demanding that their governments take action to protect their futures. Whilst commentators from the mainstream press jeered, students in the UK chanted “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” in support of the opposition leader, whilst holding up banners criticising the Conservative government. The British demonstrators had their own manifesto. Their rallying cry: “Change is needed, and it’s needed now!” These were not random, isolated events — they are symptoms of a decaying system.

The Skripal Files by Mark Urban

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Jeremy Corbyn, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Skype

From the start though the police cautioned against making any link with the Skripal affair. On the other side of the social-media battlefield there were many who had nothing to do with Russia expressing scepticism that Russia had targeted the Skripals. From the supporters of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn decrying the similarities with Britain’s journey to war in Iraq to those who could see some connection between Skripal and the Trump dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, many of those rubbishing the Whitehall version of what had happened were not following Kremlin talking points. Having said all that, there were clearly information strategies deployed by the opposing governments that fed into the wider arena, with lines even being used unwittingly by many who debated the issue.

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

The difference was that Chávez had control over the world’s largest oil reserves at a time when oil prices were soaring, so he received almost $1,000 billion that could keep that policy afloat for a little longer. That was enough for Chávez to be the left’s favourite demagogue for a while. Bernie Sanders said that the American dream was more alive in Venezuela than in the US. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn praised Chávez for showing that ‘the poor matter and wealth can be shared’. Oxfam called Venezuela ‘Latin America’s inequality success story’. In an open letter to ‘Dear President Chávez’, luminaries of the Left such as Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn and others state that they ‘see Venezuela not only as a model democracy but also as a model of how a country’s oil wealth can be used to benefit all of its people.’36 On paper, that $1,000 billion was enough to make every extremely poor individual in Venezuela a millionaire.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

During the pandemic, Arcuri appeared to suggest that Johnson’s new wife, Carrie Johnson, was a Satanist, alongside others in government. Her feed suggested that vaccines were a ‘genocidal initiative’ and accused people promoting jabs as ‘paid for shills’.70 This is hardly a problem unique to the Conservative party. Piers Corbyn, the brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, had built a fringe career as something of a rogue weather forecaster and climate change conspiracist. But Covid-19 saw him pivot rapidly to anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown protest of an extreme sort. Corbyn shared photos of his supporters mobbing the current Labour leader Keir Starmer, calling him a ‘traitor’ who ‘protected paedophiles’.71 Corbyn has suggested vaccines are part of a ‘new world order’ agenda and claimed they are a ‘hoax’, while his supporters are often pictured with QAnon-related apparel, signs or slogans.72 These strange cross-political combinations were just as visible in the US conspiratorial anti-vaccine movements, with perhaps even stranger outcomes in their rallies.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

The first is to increase government spending on R&D: spending more on university research, public research institutes, or research undertaken by businesses. Paying for research is one of the least ideologically controversial types of investment a government can make to promote growth: it is popular with Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders on the left, Peter Thiel on the right, and a significant number of politicians and pundits in between. The rationale harks back to one of our four S’s of intangibles: spillovers. Because returns on R&D are not always captured by the person or business investing in it, businesses do less R&D than is optimal for the economy as a whole, and therefore government has a legitimate role in stepping in, either funding research in universities or institutes or paying firms to do R&D with grants or tax breaks.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

The dream is for tech-savvy co-ops to empower workers; otherwise, workers could dehumanizingly be ordered up like pizzas. As those suffering from unstable hours, precarious jobs, and low wages today include everyone from contract worker Uber drivers to document review lawyers to retail employees, platform cooperativism is now being mentioned by politicians—among them, the British Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn, who praised the “cooperative ownership of digital platforms”—as a way forward in an exploitative age. “If we are all producing value,” said Sean Ansanelli, a platform cooperativist app developer, explaining the philosophy behind it, “why shouldn’t we all share the benefits of that value?” There are also platforms for employee-run and employee-owned cooperatives for nannies and cleaners, like Beyond Care Childcare Cooperative, a child-care co-op in Brooklyn, New York, which is run by the nanny members themselves, with the guidance of the nonprofit Cooperative Development Program at the Center for Family Life (CFL).

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

And, in America, Donald Trump has mounted an insurgent campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency on a platform of virulent anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. The nationalist right is ascendant around the rich world. So, too, is a more radical left. This new left, however, has not yet enjoyed as much electoral success as the radical right. The hard-left Jeremy Corbyn shook the British establishment by taking control of Britain’s Labour party, but he has not been able to wrest control of the government from the Tories. Bernie Sanders, a long-time socialist senator from Vermont, mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, yet ultimately fell short of the mark.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton

British Empire, deindustrialization, full employment, garden city movement, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Leo Hollis, manufacturing employment, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Russell Brand, starchitect, systems thinking, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, young professional

They represent a small recalibration and a significant – though inadequate – recognition of the role local government can play in providing the decent homes our people so desperately need. It seemed in the 2017 general election that that recognition might extend across the major parties. A left-wing Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn pledged to suspend Right to Buy and build ‘at least 100,000 council and housing association homes a year for genuinely affordable rent or sale’.67 The Liberal Democrats promised to ‘directly build homes to fill the gap left by the market’ with the support of a ‘new government-backed British Housing and Infrastructure Development Bank’.68 And, most surprisingly, even the Conservatives conceded that ‘we will never achieve the numbers of new houses we require without the active participation of social and municipal housing providers’.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Over the past couple of years, LTNs have become a hot topic all over England. Across London you will see signs erected in people’s gardens that read “Stop the Road Closures.” Some of the planters have been tipped over, while cameras have been spray-painted. Piers Corbyn, the conspiracy theorist brother of Jeremy Corbyn, Britain’s former opposition leader, thinks that they are part of a “new normal” agenda intended to turn Britain into a dictatorship under the guise of a fake public health emergency. Or something like that anyway. Britain’s right-wing tabloids, in particular the Daily Mail, have made campaigning against LTNs an obsession.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar