Opinion

In an extraordinary swipe at Britain's press, the UK's top anti-terror cop called out the British press for the hypocrisy of blaming social media for radicalising terrorists while publishing the Christchurch killer's deadly manifesto to an audience of millions. In an open letter to the mainstream media, Head of UK Counter Terrorism Policing, Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations (ACSO) Neil Basu called for "a sensible conversation about how to report terrorism in a way that doesn’t help terrorists." In a...

There are some events that traumatise a country. Some countries are unlucky enough to experience dozens of national disasters, making trauma part of their cultural make up. This true of Ireland, Hungary, Germany and Russia to mention just a few. But not Great Britain. The UK has had its fair share of crises - the Norman invasion, the Blitz, the Civil War - but the British are not a people to wallow in their failures. Even when the country’s standing...

“What connects the vile and dangerous rise of Islamophobia in Australia, America and the UK?”, James O'Brien pondered on Twitter above a 2015 post by international media oligarch Rupert Murdoch which called on “Moslems” to recognise the “growing jihadist cancer” that is supposedly rising within their ranks. Although the national media cannot be held solely responsible for attacks such as the one orchestrated in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 people in their place of worship, ignoring the role it plays...

Now people and parliament is finally waking up to the total dog’s dinner Brexit is, it’s more important than ever to march for the public to have a final say over our future. Brexit’s biggest chance of succeeding was always to bore the population into submission, and let them tell themselves that it couldn’t be stopped, that resistance was useless. That’s why in October 2017, myself and a few friends first started taking photos of dogs posing with ‘#Wooferendum –...

By Steve Tooze, member of local climate change action group Lambeth for a Cool Planet My kids and a 16-year-old girl that I’ve never met called Greta Thunberg have turned me into a climate change radical. And today it seemed like I wasn’t alone. I stood amongst dozens of friends and neighbours on an overcast, blustery March afternoon on the pavement outside of Lambeth town hall in Brixton, South London. Our council has laudably declared a Climate Emergency and we all agreed that we...

They don’t want a house, a mortgage, a car, things. All they want is their future, their planet. And all they have to offer in return? Only ideas, energy, respect, innocence, purity, originality, love and joy.

While Westminster continues to look inward, events are unfolding elsewhere along roughly the lines the remain campaign predicted over two years ago. The much maligned ‘project fear’ has been easy to discount until recently with Brexiteers pointing to the fact that economic indicators have not fallen as much as was predicted in 2016. The reality that dozens of companies have already left the UK, are planning to leave or have simply collapsed under the uncertainty of Brexit is brushed away...

The extreme far right now commands an electorate of over 22 million across Europe. From 1999 to 2014, the share of seats of extreme right-wing- and neofascist parties in the European Parliament has more than doubled from 11% to 23%, and they are projected to be the second largest bloc in May's elections. Is Europe under threat from the biggest rise of the far right since the 1930s? Walter Baier of Transform! Europe last weekend adressed the ¡No Pasaran! conference...

It hasn’t been lost on despairing frontline police officers that it has taken the tragic, brutal death of a 17 year-old white girl to propel the issue of knife crime and its attendant issues into the headlines. It is those police officers who, on a daily basis, turn on their ‘blues and twos’ in order to get to the scene of a stabbing or shooting frequently not knowing what they will find when they get there. Will they be confronted...