The defining characteristic of the neoliberal global economy is that nobody is in charge.  Decades of deregulation in the years since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to power has resulted in a state of “depolitisisation,” in which governments have retreated from activities deemed to interfere with “the market.”  Even …

If you were looking for a moment when Brexit and the election of Donald Trump became inevitable, you could do a lot worse than going back to 2008 when the neoliberal left chose to bailout Wall Street and the City of London.  The way in which the bailout worked was …

New deliveries of eggs to British supermarkets are being snapped up as quickly as the shelf stackers can get them onto the shelves.  At the same time, tons of eggs are going off in warehouses which currently hold massive stocks of food.  The unexpected reason for this situation, we learn …

It should come as no surprise to learn that most of us are not included in the list of critical workers published by the UK government.  Hedge fund managers, permanent secretaries, members of parliament, corporate CEOs, senior local government managers and the celebrities so beloved of our mainstream media all …

A fifty year old, born in 1970, would have come of age in the years after the financial “Big Bang” which cemented in place the neoliberal global economy.  Its architects – the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – were in their second terms; having seen off the left …

There is nothing quite like queues and empty shelves to sell news stories.  So it is that the UK media have finally got the story that they have been waiting for since SARS-CoV-2 began its 2020 world tour.  Toilet rolls, hand sanitiser and sanitary towels are just a few of …

In a piece for the Guardian today, columnist and rent-an-activist Owen Jones naively asks “Why don’t we treat the climate crisis with the same urgency as coronavirus?”  It isn’t even an original thought.  There are memes all over social media just now comparing the current death rate from COVID-19 (around …

The UK government has published plans for responding to the threatened COVID-19 pandemic which ministers say could affect between 50 and 80 percent of the population, and could result in 20 percent of the workforce being off sick at the same time. As with all of these things, we begin …

An excerpt from my new book which is available on Amazon or to order from bookshops and libraries: I didn’t set out to write about Brexit.  My interests have always been in the far more profound crisis stemming from what environmentalists – among others – refer to as trying to have …

The late Albert Bartlett, a professor in nuclear physics at the University of Colorado, famously explained that: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” What Bartlett was referring to was the way in which most people misunderstand growth – whether of an …