Nathan Akehurst is a writer and campaigner working in political communications and advocacy.
Former British prime minister David Cameron has been exposed using his contacts in government to help out his new bosses at finance firm Greensill Capital. The scandal points to the cronyism among Britain’s elites — and how a wider culture of privatization and outsourcing provides a breeding ground for corruption.
Boris Johnson wants the UK to spend more on arms and reassert its “global role.” Along with a government clampdown on anti-racist organizing, his strategy is clear — imperial grandstanding and the crushing of dissent.
A prosecutor in Sicily has charged twenty-one people, including the crew of the Iuventa migrant rescue ship, with aiding illegal immigration. The potential long jail terms show how European countries have criminalized aid for refugees — and how little they care about the thousands who drown in the Mediterranean.
A British government ad campaign targets lockdown rule-breakers, blamed for undermining measures to tackle the pandemic. But the real problem is the government’s failure to set effective rules to start with — scapegoating individual behavior even as it has allowed the virus to let rip in crowded schools and workplaces.
Twitter profited from Donald Trump’s racist outbursts for years, only to delete his account a few days before his departure. A figure with such media platform runs no risk of being “no platformed” — but tech giants still have too much power over what the rest of us say.
The polling industry claims to offer live snapshots of what the public thinks. Yet the obsession with polls is reducing politics to market research.