Ian Sinclair
Last year, it was reported that the ministry of defence (MoD) had tried to stop the publication of this book, written by a British army officer. The MoD argued that it was inappropriate for a serving officer (Martin has since resigned) to publish such a critical work about Britain’s 2006–2014 occupation of Helmand province in Afghanistan.
There is certainly much to embarrass the British military in Martin’s work, a reworking of his PhD thesis. Based on over 150 interviews with…
Coming, as it does, in the wake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent warning that global warming is on course to inflict ‘severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts’ on the planet, this book couldn’t be more timely or important.
To make the necessary reduction in carbon emissions, Klein explains, the world needs to institute immediate, transformational change on the scale of the American New Deal of the 1930s or the national mobilisations during the Second…
CRUDIFICATION, an Iraqi Fine Artists Association in
Britain Group show in London, features the work
of Jalal Alwan (pictured), and others. www.p21.org.uk
Just over ten years since it failed the public so completely over the 2003 Iraq War, the mainstream media’s coverage of the current Iraq crisis has been predictably awful.
“Stop droning on Mr Cameron… SEND IN THE DRONES” was The Sun’s considered…
Everyday Sexism is already an important touchstone in the fourth-wave feminism that many commentators are now heralding.
The book comes out of the website Laura Bates, a young journalist, set up in April 2012 after experiencing a particularly bad week of street harassment. Since then the website and Twitter account has collected tens of thousands of testimonies from girls and women detailing the appalling level of sexism that continues to blight societies around the globe…
Just over ten years since it failed the public so completely over the 2003 Iraq War, the mainstream media’s coverage of the current Iraq crisis has been predictably awful.
“Stop droning on Mr Cameron… SEND IN THE DRONES” was The Sun’s considered front page on 4 September 2014. At the opposite end of the British press spectrum The Independent’s…
‘Napalm was born a hero’, argues Columbia University’s Robert Neer about the creation of the sticky, jellied incendiary by US scientists in the Second World War.
Burning at over 800 ° C, napalm played a decisive role in the Pacific War, with perhaps 100,000 Japanese dying in the infamous napalm attack on Tokyo on 9 March 1945. The US ‘scorched and boiled and baked to death’ more people in that one night than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, according to US air force…
Richard Seymour, founder of the popular Lenin’s Tomb blog and regular contributor to the Guardian, is one of the smartest, sharpest Leftist intellectuals working in the UK today. After writing books critiquing liberal imperialism, David Cameron and Christopher Hitchens, he has now turned his attention to the 2008 financial crisis and the British government’s austerity agenda.
Seymour’s central concern is that the Left has ‘nothing to show’ for itself after four years of a…
When the Coalition Government was defeated in parliament over military intervention in Syria last summer many activists probably thought that was the end of the matter. After all Prime Minister David Cameron had conceded ‘the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that and the Government will act accordingly.’
What many people don’t realise is the UK…
Opening the door to large-scale privatisation, the introduction of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act ‘marked the end of a national health service in England’, according to two contributors to this important and very timely book.
The coalition government’s plan to ‘reform’ the NHS did not appear in the election manifestos of either the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, the coalition agreement itself explicitly stated they would ‘stop the top-down…
Although the corporate world has long claimed the values of self-help, entrepreneurialism and innovation for itself, this book – based on the ideas of the Transition movement, of which Rob Hopkins is the founder and figurehead – proves that progressive activists have as strong a claim on these principles as anyone else.
Encouraging local action to combat global threats, the Transition movement is a grassroots network of communities…
This book explores the revolutionary politics and activism that sprang up in Argentina in December 2001. With the state collapsing in the midst of a severe economic crisis, sections of the population responded by organising demonstrations and neighbourhood assemblies.
In the months and years following this societal rupture, workers began to occupy their workplaces and…
Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar Lopez Rivera has the dubious distinction of being one of the longest-serving political prisoners in the world.
Having served in the US army in Vietnam, Rivera returned to Chicago and started working to improve living conditions for Puerto Ricans in the city.
Radicalised during this period, he became a forceful advocate for Puerto Rican independence from the United States. Facing police repression, Rivera went underground for several years. In 1981…
A central figure in Stop the War Coalition (STWC) since its founding in 2001, Chris Nineham has written a short, timely and very readable book exploring the relationship between the anti-war movement and the Blair government in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Nineham provides a concise summary of the discussions within the Bush administration after 9/11 and an interesting analysis of the surprisingly positive media coverage of the anti-war protests in the UK circa 15 February…
David Wearing, co-editor, New Left Project
As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci observed, power cannot rule by force alone. Hegemony requires that a sufficient portion of the population view the status quo as fundamentally legitimate, or at least unalterable. Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman described how the corporate media function in a way that manufactures this popular consent, by framing discourse, promoting certain perspectives…
Taking its cue from Martin Luther King’s famous 1967 speech denouncing the war in Vietnam, We Have Not Been Moved focuses on the resistance to both racism and militarism in the United States.
The three editors — all experienced activists — have collated 90 contributions looking at the connections and cleavages between the two issues, including the over-representation of ethnic minorities fighting in the armed forces, government money funding aggressive wars overseas rather than…
