Unless you’ve been living on another planet for the last year, you cannot but help to have heard politicians using the phrase: Build Back Better.  This political bandwagon is borne out of desperation to find a way out of the mess they have created in responding, out of greed and …

The third decade of the twenty-first century could turn out to be fantastic after all.  Emerging from the ashes and insanity of 2020, we are now set for a new age of peace and prosperity.  Who says so?  The Guardian’s energy correspondent, Jillian Ambrose: “The global economy could be on …

There was something vaguely Churchillian about Boris Johnson’s address to the nation on 12 March last year: “We have all got to be clear, this is the worst public health crisis for a generation. Some people compare it to seasonal flu. Alas, that is not right. Due to the lack …

Inflation casts a long shadow over the political economy of the modern world.  So much so that the threat of its return is still given much more weight in governing circles than the fact of its absence for more than a decade.  The reason is best understood through the eyes of …

Harsh as it may sound, the retail and hospitality sector of the economy which has suffered most immediately under the Covid restrictions was also the least productive.  For those who follow conventional economic models, then, the damage currently being wrought on that sector is of little concern.  Shops and cafés …

Thousands of patients are queuing on trolleys in the corridors of overstretched hospitals.  NHS managers have appealed to the public to only seek hospital care in a genuine emergency.  Those genuine emergency patients have been told to take taxis to A&E because of a shortage of ambulances.  Meanwhile, ambulance paramedics …

It has been a year since I last wrote about Brexit.  My reason was simple; there was no longer anything to discuss.  Despite having written extensively about the process between 2015 and 2019, Boris Johnson’s massive election victory a year ago brought the process to an end.  In short order, …

Those of us of a certain age can remember a more benevolent time[1] in which schoolchildren were given free milk every morning.  Some may also remember the free NHS orange juice and rosehip syrup that was given to young children due to concern that they had insufficient vitamin C in …

Exactly when the Guardian made the transition from serious newspaper to neoliberal propaganda sheet is a matter of debate.  Some would argue it goes back to the mid-1990s and the rise of Blair’s New Labour; others say that is only since 2008 that it changed for the worse.  Whatever, the …

In the more conspiratorial corners of the Internet, the “Great Reset” is a sinister public face of an elite plan to enslave humanity by creating a global authoritarian surveillance super-state, compete with re-education camps for those who suffer from wrongthink, and Soylent Green-style euthanasia camps for addressing the twin problems …