Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Britain The Labour council, faced with opposition, is cleaving to its “blame Tory cuts” line, sending out self-congratulatory emails about its successful budgets that don’t even mention these closures, and only talk about the services they’ve managed to protect. In a dynamic that has been replicated all over the country, the Labour council has become the hand-wringing instrument of Conservative austerity. "Left-wing" councils enact Tory cuts

If no bases for a ‘new nationalism’ have yet disclosed themselves, why are politicians so desperate to assert one? Could it be because nationalism empowers politicians to police culture? Or, more accurately, to culturalise social questions , which are then policed? Labour and new patriotism

"The most powerful states within the capitalist system have historically been the ones which establish the International Political Economy regimes of international capitalism and they establish rules which favour the expansion of their own capitalism."  —Peter Gowan 2005, an unpublished paper " Gabriel Hetland  (theguardian.com, 24 January) is right to highlight how US sanctions have aggravated the economic crisis in Venezuela, perhaps by deliberate policy. US actions follow a predictable pattern. Just over a year ago, another Latin American country riven by economic and social problems descended into widespread street protests and violence following a disputed election, with dozens of people killed by security forces. That country was impoverished Honduras, where the pro-US Juan Orlando Hernández was re-elected president in an election many, including the Organization of American States, saw as fraudulent. The US response that time was to support Hernández agai

New Orientalism This sounds like "a bad history" by a new orientalist. Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities

From the archive For what Tuck has established is that modern natural-law theory was forged in integral connexion with "the kind of militarist and imperialist expansion in which the Dutch and English writers gloried." The commercial and colonial expansion of the Dutch and English states in the seventeenth century could be considered, from the angle of the European international order at the time, as something of a sideshow. But Tuck demonstrates with great erudition and theoretical acuity that it was absolutely central to the substance of the modern natural-law tradition, out of which contemporary rights-based liberal individualism has grown. His book might more properly be called "The Origins of Anglo-American Liberalism in the Legitimation of Imperial Expansion." The Origins of Atlantic Liberalism

Domestic workers in Britain When escaping an abusive employer is a crime Don't blame Britain. Blame those abusive Saudis and Kuwaitis who are "backwards" and don't know anything about "women rights".

According to wikipedia , proportionally there are more homeless people in the UK than in China or the U.S England: Birmingham homeless living in "ruthless conditions' Like corruption, huge inequality, exploitation (at home and abroad), arms sales, support of dictators, etc, homelessnes is caused by Brussels and the EU. After Brexit these "un-English values" will disappear.