Milan Rai
Joan Robinson, the great economist, once wrote: ‘The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.’
British politics in recent months has all been about ‘the fiscal hole’, said to be a gigantic £55bn gap in the government’s finances. Journalists and politicians talk about it as though it is a real thing.
It is not.
The ‘fiscal hole’ sounds like it’s a £55bn gap…
In November, there was a surprising development in relation to the Ukraine War, with pressure for a diplomatic solution coming from the US military (pressure that has been resisted fiercely by the civilian political leadership).
The New York Times reported on 10 November that the chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, general Mark Milley, argued in private top-level meetings for…
‘The deepest power is that of determining what people consider normal,’ British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in the Financial Times on 13 November.
The next day, British prime minister Rishi Sunak condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with these words: ‘There can be no normalisation of [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s behaviour, which has no place in the international community.’
Perhaps Sunak was referring to the massive waves of Russian missile attacks on…
The United States could make a huge contribution to the safety and wellbeing of the Ukrainian people – and to global security – by giving its full support to a peace process between Ukraine and Russia, and by promising that all US sanctions on Russia will be lifted once a peace treaty is signed and Russian forces are withdrawn.
Instead, US president Joe Biden is playing a cynical game by trying to appear as though he is in favour of peace talks, while actually having no interest in…
Below is a list of the UK public opinion polls used to draw up the chart on p17 of PN 2661, reproduced below. This chart showed that, consulting 24 polls during the period 1954 – 2015, only three showed public support for unilateral nuclear disarmament dipping – briefly – below 20 percent (1963: 15 percent / 1964: 16 percent / 2014: 18 percent). The other 21 polls showed much stronger support for British unilateral nuclear…
When I came into the peace movement as a teenager, back in the time of the dinosaurs, I somehow picked up a Very Wrong Idea. I came to believe that We (peace people) were completely different from, and so much better than, Them (war-supporters). We were more intelligent, more noble, better-informed. They... well, they were different.
In my case, picking up this belief flew in the face of my own experience, if I had only had eyes to see. I grew up in a…
‘I did not come into politics to be a member of the Kamikaze Pilots’ Association.’
Yes, that is a Tory MP responding to the disastrous political impact of an unpopular and destabilising budget announcement from a Conservative government.
No, it’s not from September 2022.
It’s from March 1981.
Those are the words of liberal Conservative MP Cyril Townsend, making clear his opposition to chancellor Geoffrey Howe’s economy-shrinking, austerity budget. Inflation was…
Every time the US has increased its military support for Ukraine, Russia has responded by escalating in some way.
We’re approaching a very dangerous point now, where a Russian nuclear attack starts to become a real possibility (see p7), with catastrophic consequences not just for Ukraine, but almost certainly for the world.
However, as Noam Chomsky recently pointed out to Truthout: ‘The impact of the war goes far beyond: to the millions facing starvation with the…
Despite his warlike words, and the enormous brutality of his invasion forces, Russian president Vladimir Putin has also signalled that he wants negotiations with Ukraine to end the war.
Britain and the US must end their anti-negotiations position (see PN 2661).
Putin put pro-negotiations language into both his 21 and 30 September speeches, which…
Nuclear disarmament campaigns have often focused on hardware, on warheads and missiles and submarines.
Nuclear doctrine, or how governments plan to use their nuclear weapons, have had a lot less attention.
This is a pity because there are a lot of easy wins available for the peace movement on doctrine. (Also, the strength of the movement in the 1980s was as much to do with doctrine as it was to do with hardware, I would argue.)
As I noted last issue, an…
‘If the choice for Russia is fighting a losing war, and losing badly and Putin falling, or some kind of nuclear demonstration, I wouldn’t bet that they wouldn’t go for the nuclear demonstration.’ That was Tony Brenton, a former UK ambassador to Russia, talking to Reuters in August.
Western experts have explained some of the ‘demonstration’ options for Putin, if he does use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, detonating a single ‘low-yield’ warhead in a way that does not kill anyone: ‘It could…
All year, it has been infuriating to watch the debate about Boris Johnson as pressure built up against the British prime minister until he was finally forced from office on 7 July by his own party – which believed he would damage its chances of winning the next election.
Johnson was sacked by the Conservatives for his personal weaknesses, such as dishonesty and irresponsibility. This was what the media also focused on. Near the liberal extreme, the Guardian editorial on his…
There are activists who are respected or admired, and there are activists who are loved. Bruce was loved, he was beloved.
Bruce Kent was human decency turned into a human being.
For people of my generation, who came of age in the 1980s, Bruce was a beacon of sanity in a terrifying world. He was the voice of the peace movement: direct, honest and completely fearless.
He has continued to be that beacon of sanity and common sense.
Pat Gaffney, one of Bruce’s close…
As Noam Chomsky has repeatedly pointed out since February: ‘our prime concern should be to think through carefully what we can do to bring the criminal Russian invasion to a quick end and to save the Ukrainian victims from more horrors’ (PN 2660).
This must mean an immediate ceasefire and a quick peace agreement along the lines nearly agreed at the end of March.
The reality is that this brutal and dangerous war will end in one of three ways: the two sides will…
There should be a general strike if Tory MP Liz Truss becomes prime minister on 5 September and pursues the harsh anti-union policies she has announced recently.
That’s the view of Mick Lynch, secretary general of the RMT rail union, who says: ‘Truss is proposing to make effective trade unionism illegal in Britain and to rob working people of a key democratic right. If these proposals become law, there will be the biggest resistance mounted by the entire trade union movement,…
