Opinion

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...

With knife crime on the rise, Dr Tim Bateman, Reader in Youth Justice at the University of Bedfordshire, comments on why a more nuanced approach that focuses on improving young people’s environments is needed: Tragic events such as the fatal stabbing of two teenagers in London last weekend rightly create public concern and their devastating impact cannot be underestimated, but it’s important to be clear about the scale and root causes of the problem. While there has been a rise...

I am not going to assume that you have already seen the confrontation two weeks ago between Senator Dianne Feinstein and a group of schoolchildren over the (no pun intended, at least not by me) green paper proposals collectively titled the Green New Deal. As we live in a time of scandal by the hour it is quite easy to miss one or a dozen a week, so if you are not familiar with that clash you can find the...

News today that councils are having to sell off libraries, playgrounds and public buildings to pay for austerity-induced cuts and redundancies should come as no surprise to those well versed in the self-defeating nature of such policies. As early as 2016 the International Monetary Fund were sounding the alarm about the ineffectiveness of the neoliberal doctrine that has dominated economics for the past three decades. In an article seized on by the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, the IMF economists said...