debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
On Thursday, 20 January 2011, the EU Commission was forced to suspend the trading of Co2 certificates in the frame of the European Emission Trading System (ETS) due to fraud and so called cyber-attacks. This step became necessary after the theft of seven million Euros in carbon emissions allowances and the illegal transfer of up [...]
As somebody said on the BBC’s Newsnight, ‘Tunisia was small fry—Egypt is the largest country in the Middle East, and if Egypt changes, the whole Arab world changes’. I’m an economist, not a Middle East specialist. My only qualification is that I once lived in the Middle East and am passionate about its future. The [...]
The Egyptian revolution, to date an inspiring and seemingly entirely grassroots and popular uprising against an ossified, dysfunctional regime, is entering a critical phase. As I write – the curfew has just started on Sunday - the regime appears to be preparing to strike back. Cosmetic changes have been made to the government. Mubarak has [...]
Cultural conflicts are merely symptoms or reflections of deep-rooted socio-economic problems or injustices: this has been, and continues to be, the traditional view espoused by many European social democrats. The logic which flows from this is pretty simple: if we get the socio-economic questions right, the answers to our cultural problems will fall into place. [...]
The Liberal Conservative coalition government, self-consciously progressive in orientation, while appropriating Labour’s language of mutual and cooperative practice, raises a fundamental question as to what distinctive gifts Labour can now bring to the party. Beyond saying, ‘it’s not fair’, what resources does Labour have to explain the financial crash and its electoral failure, particularly in [...]
Social democrats: Do they know where they are aiming? Do they have a notion of ‘good society’ worth fighting for? I doubt it. I believe they don’t. Not in the part of the world we inhabit, at any rate. Former Chancellor Schroeder is on record squinting at both Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s estates and [...]
Mutualism may be a useful alternative model for public services and private companies but the left must go wider and deeper than that particular model. Social democrats need to embrace the Big Society idea and extend it into the economic realm. In his essay for this series, William Davies makes the observation that while the Government [...]
Media reporting on surveillance and policing tends to feed an image of the state as all powerful, all knowing. British citizens are the object of constant monitoring by an intrusive, illiberal state that is intent on maximising control over its population. In academic literature, the notion of the surveillance state is heavily influenced by Michel [...]
Minimally, George Osborne has three questions to answer following the negative growth figure published by the ONS. First, what proportion of the negative 0.5% is explained by bad weather? Although weather did play a role in the poor showing, nobody—I repeat, nobody—would put this result down entirely to weather (the BBC’s Stephanie Flanders said that [...]
During the last decades, labour markets in many countries have been deregulated and trade union strength has declined. Trade liberalization and deregulated financial, product and labour markets created a mutually reinforcing trend towards weaker regulatory provisions. Lower labour market protection and increased precarious employment resulted in a declining wage share and growing inequality. The lack [...]
When Obama sat down with Hu this week, he faced the quandary raised last year, according to WikiLeaks, by Hillary Clinton: how a nation talks tough with its banker. The euro crisis and resultant Chinese investment in European sovereign debt, partly in a bid to help shore up the single currency, means that several EU [...]
Following the 3rd Africa-EU Summit in Libya last November, I would like to propose establishing comprehensive health care systems in Africa on the basis of solidarity and sustainable health policy. Health is a human right In the 1948 United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the international community professed the extraordinary significance of the field [...]
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