Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“In 1986 the Economist reported that recent scandals had “raised doubts abroad that the City of London is the most honest place to do business”. Lord Roskill, the senior judge Margaret Thatcher’s government appointed to examine the state of fraud in the UK, agreed. ‘While petty frauds, clumsily committed, are likely to be detected and punished, it is all too likely that the largest and most cleverly executed crimes escape unpunished’, his commission reported.” That is in line with a Czech proverb: the big thieves hang the small ones. “The harder and more complex the investigations it [the Serious Fraud Office] takes on, the more it is fulfilling its mission – and the likelier it is to fail.” “Having ruled that the agency mistreated the Trio’s corporate empire [ENRC/Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation], a judge will now decide how much UK taxpayers’ money should be paid to the oligarchs’ company in damages. The SFO has set aside a quarter of a billion pounds.” “On 24 August 2023, 10 ...

“[T]he vilification of migrants and Muslims forms part of a primitive persecutory phantasy, shaped by the UK’s colonial history and by its entrenched material disparities.” “[I]t would be more accurate to view contemporary British bordering as a continuation of colonial violence: an attempt to police the nation’s last frontier, so that the wealth and status gained from imperial conquest is preserved, materially and symbolically – and withheld from former colonial subjects.” This goes with the rhetoric of politicians who stress that UK needs migrants, but they have to be skilled ones and the country ‘legally’. They did not mind before – in fact encouraged – the hundreds of thousands of Polish and others, many of whom were unskilled, when British capital needed cheap labour. During the ‘great boom’ of capitalism in the 1959s and 1960s liberal democracy could thrive at home without the need to scapegoat the Other. On the contrary, many workers from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean were e...

“[S]uspension of normal safeguards was often unjustifiable, costing the public purse billions and eroding trust in political institutions.” Billions? Hang on. What about the migrants?  An aspect of ‘our values’

I like the use of the term regime rather than the mainstream one ‘government’. The latter has been made prevalent by the corporate media and most politicians, including a few on the left. Thus the term regime, they claim, can be applied only to authoritarian states. Like other definitions, once you repeat it many times it become normalised. The accurate terms – the ones that reflect the nature of something, the social relations, etc – are marginalised. This is also found in the academic fields. How is the Starmer regime likely to govern? Related Landscapes of capital

Via Tony Morrow on Facebook

My introduction: To understand the crisis of the National Health Service, the bad handling of the pandemic*, stagnant economy, weak productivity, a state struggling to invest adequately in the green economy, inability to build enough and affordable houses, expensive rent, decades of poor investment in infrastructure by OECD measures, consumption, and consumerism, driven by debt, Labour/Conservatives capitalist values, one has to look at the economic model of the British economy. In reviewing Brett Christophers’s work, Cédric Durant has provided a good overview of such an economic model of accumulation and its ramifications as well as some criticism of Christophers’s take on capitalism in general and what might replace it. ——— *I doubt it that the recently publish report will ever mention the economic model pursued by Britain for more than four decades and how it played a major role in the infrastructure of health and the well-being of the Brits. ***** Few today will need convincing th...

A Jacobin’s article in Capital section. Yet Capital mostly looks nationalist and patriotic, not a web of social relations and geopolitical power. This kind of capital is not connected to the Israeli war on Gaza, Gulf capital in UK, the ‘new cold war’, the stagnation of the UK economy and low productivity … ‘The Big Money’ are treated as an isolated thing that bears no relation to capitalism and the environment as one whole.  Furthermore, capital in the article has no relation with why people vote and why [will] vote Labour – the article was published before the Labour win in the 2024 elections. Why do people vote and keep voting although they know about ‘ the big money ’. Is this big money really the fundamental factor or is it the years if not the decades of interconnected social and economic factors of the British capitalism that makes ‘a government loose and an opposition doesn’t win’, thus perpetrating the power of capital, capital accumulation, an imperialist regime of terror...

Ms Blakeley admits she is writes as a Marxist. It is astonishing that she and the Tribune encourage the fragmentation of social thought . Complicity in crime (with Israel) besides hypocrisy, double standard, war on refugees and descrimination, obscene inequality … are not topics to be included in what is missing in Starmer’s manifesto.   At the time of publishing, I have not yet received a reply by Tribune to my comment.

A regional war led by the US and a hot of Arab regimes, UK, in defence of Israel Related “Though the U.S. created the conditions that may have encouraged Netanyahu’s gambit , it was reportedly Israel, acting on its own behalf, without coordination with its allies, that precipitated the latest grave escalation.”

We implement extremist policies at home and abroad. We support extremist regimes. We support an extremist super-power. We engage in extremist wars. We sell extremist weapons. We support an extremist genocidal regime. We normalise extremist salaries, extremist wealth, extremist financial sector …  As you know, it's all right to treat ’extremists’ extremely. It's the desire to normalise one’s extremism that makes regimes like the UK’s call their enemies ’extremists’ . When the next violent attack takes place in a Western city they will as usual tell us about ‘terrorism’ re-mobilising their massive media – public and private – to hide their massive state violence in its different forms and shapes – mainly their economic and military violence.

In the sixth economy in the world On minimum wage Neglected and exploited Foreign nurses

'I earn £1,600 a month and two-thirds goes on bills' Households earning more than £60,000 on how they are struggling financially

“  The single most important factor is the dramatic breakdown of upward social mobility in the UK .”

Accurate description of the state of the major trade unions and the Labour Part y.  However, there is no self-criticism of the Stop the War Coalition, especially the way it managed the protests prior and after the 2003 war on Iraq. There is no self-criticism of the undemocratic procedures they pursued, the selected, speakers, etc and most importantly, Stop the War Coalition’s timidity in radicalising the movement. There is also the almost-usual-exaggeration and overoptimism you read in the speeches and articles by Stop the War leaders/organisers. Are not the components of the coalition themselves a hindrance towards radicalism in the face of compromises and in the face of cooptation? Lindsey German repeats the same clichés about elections, which contradicts what the she herself states about the continuation of the UK imperialist actions in the Middle East and elsewhere regardless of the party running the British regime*. One should note how the interview completely ignored the war ...

The objective of the US-UK imperialism strikes on Yemen is to stop the disruption to one of the arteries if capital accumulation and support Israel’s goals on its war on the Palestinians. The strikes on the Houthis might actually embolden the Houthis and see they support strengthened .  Everything that was worth striking has been struck by the Saudi coalition in the past nine years,” al-Iryani said, referring to the war waged against the Houthis by a Saudi-led coalition that began fighting the Houthis in 2015 after they had overthrown President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, head of the internationally recognised government. “I don’t think [US attacks on Houthi targets] are going to act as a deterrent to the Houthis,” Raiman al-Hamdani, a researcher at the ARK Group said.

This an adapted rewriting of Heinrich von Treischke’s statement. “International law becomes meaningless when any attempt is made to apply its principles equally to barbarian nations. The only way to punish the Palestinians  is to make them pay tens of times for what they did; it is the only sort of example they understand. For the Israeli state and its backers to apply international law in cases like this would not be either humanity or justice; it would be shameful weakness.” The original quote: In 1898, the German political scientist Heinrich von Treischke stated what many of his contemporaries would have regarded as the obvious: “International law becomes meaningless when any attempt is made to apply its principles equally to barbarian nations. The only way to punish a black tribe is to burn their villages; it is the only sort of example they understand. For the German empire to apply international law in cases like this would not be either humanity or justice; it would be shame...

There is a focus on capitalism in the UK .  I don’t understand what Michael Roberts means by three socio-economic systems. Is it not capitalism the socio-economic system of our era?

The open letter makes it clear that these issues are not confined to surgery or anaesthetics but are commonplace. Dr Hilary Williams said there was widespread sexual innuendo when she was a trainee. "It's quite frightening to think that the perpetrators are in some way being protected by current systems - not necessarily deliberately," she added. Related Female surgeons sexually harassed while operating 35,000 cases of sexual misconduct in NHS [alone] in five years We know that  half of women  have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace - this rises to  seven in 10  for disabled women.  One in eight  LBT women have experienced serious sexual assault or rape at work. Four out of five women don’t report the abuse they have experienced. Male violence against women is endemic Sexual violence endemic at UK universities and colleges Pervasive in UK schools