Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Via Michael Roberts The continuing scandal of child poverty in the UK - which is accelerating. A new report by former UK PM Gordon Brown . “• One million children trying to sleep tonight without a bed of their own. • Two million boys and girls waking up in homes that do not have working washing machines cookers or fridges, never enjoying fresh or hot food, and without soap, shampoo and basic hygiene goods. • Three million forced to skip breakfast or other meals because there is no food in the house. • More than four million children officially registered as poor even on the government’s own estimates and based on its chosen definition of what constitutes poverty. With UK child poverty increasing by over 20 per cent in the past decade our country has seen the biggest increase of all the European countries – and, indeed, all advanced economies.” What's Brown's answer? End the two-child benefit gap; provide incentives for 'philanthropy' and tax gambling profits. These are...

A new book by Caroline Elkins. A review “ With its enormous breadth and ambition, it amounts to something approaching a one-volume history of imperial Britain’s use of force, torture, and deceit around the world. As devastating as the details of these tactics are, even more damning is Elkins’s account of what she argues has been the persistent and perverse misuse of law to cast a veneer of justice and respectability over the remorseless exploitation of others. “As its title suggests, Elkins’s book argues that violence was not just an incidental feature of the British Empire, not simply its midwife, so to speak. Rather, it was foundational to the system itself, a fact borne out in considerable detail.” But Elkins’s “most original argument lies not in the violence itself but rather in London’s use and abuse of the notion of the rule of law, much touted by Britain as an elevating feature of modern Western civilization and a pillar of democracy. “ Elkins convincingly demonstrates that duri...

Johnson’s been a ‘culture war’ warrior since the ‘90s