Bad news can be good for you. But the news needs to get more informative, analytical, and investigative — debates and simple presentations are not enough.
Earlier this year, in my pre-Covid naïvety, I penned — well, typed — a long(ish) read on the news media. A formative thesis of my thinking on the news, I made the fairly simple move of informing my readers that news is just a lens for the world that filters out most of the good, keeps in some of the mundane, and retains almost all the bad. But, perhaps slightly differently to most of the “bad news” takes, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
I started off with a definition of the news as reporting on things that are…
Brexit always presented an impossible conundrum for peace in Northern Ireland. Violence has now erupted on the streets.
On April 7th, the sixth night of violence between unionists, nationalists, and the Northern Irish police (PSNI), a mob threw burning projectiles into a bus, forcing its driver out and leaving the bus to go up in flames.
It was hard to avoid thinking of the now-infamous Vote Leave bus, complete with the reckless campaign and lies it is associated with.
Once a member, and now a foe: the UK is locked in a bitter dispute with the EU over vaccine nationalism, procurement, and export bans.
The rollout of vaccines is going well.
At least, that’s what you’d say if you’re from the UK, US, or Israel. Anywhere else, and you’ve probably got very different feelings about the rollout, with most countries around the world lagging far behind these frontrunners, leaving Covid-19 to wreak havoc and take thousands more lives.
This is what happens when vaccine scarcity meets nationalism and global wealth inequality: the wealthiest few win, while the poorer lose out. The developing world is struggling to even get vaccines, with the Covax facility delivering only minimal numbers to lower-income countries. …
The UK Parliament has voted to limit the right to protest, criminalise GRT communities, and give an ebullient police force yet more powers.
Buried in a large, mostly tame, albeit “tough on crime” policing bill, are some worrying provisions. Amongst the hundreds of pages of pandering to the most emotionally vindictive instincts of the middle-aged, white electorate, we move from the bad to the dangerous, and finally to the frankly scary.
Longer prison sentences are the order of the day; toughening up prison rules and enlarging protections for police officers join them in an unholy trinity of authoritarian, practically useless, mass incarceration policies. …
Anger about the government limiting the NHS pay rise to 1% is rife. But this row is just the incendiary facade of a much greater problem.
The day after a fairly well-received budget from the Chancellor, the government scored a spectacular own goal.
The 1% pay rise for NHS staff, despite the government’s protestations, was widely seen as derisory and unfair to the people who have saved lives and been pushed to the limits over the past year. Its timing was viewed even more dimly by some, snuck out under the cover of the budget announcements.
That anger is understandable, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the government promised last year that NHS staff would receive a minimum pay rise of 2.1% in 2021, partly to…
The Chancellor’s Budget on Wednesday set out a broadly positive economic roadmap for recovery, but many important policies were missing.
A little over a week after the Prime Minister laid out the roadmap for unlocking after the third, and hopefully final, lockdown, the Chancellor was tasked on Wednesday with delivering a budget that delivered on three main aims for the government:
- continuing the economic support associated with the lockdown restrictions
- supporting the recovery from the pandemic with fiscal stimulus and keeping taxes low
- setting out a plan to deal with the debt accrued during the pandemic
Last March, Rishi Sunak announced the furlough scheme, the uplift in Universal Credit, loan schemes for businesses, along with funding for coronavirus testing, PPE…
Transgender people endure vile attacks, invalidation by trans-exclusionary feminists, and invalidation by the law. It’s time for change.
With many forms of discrimination — misogyny, racial discrimination, and homophobia, for example — society is moving consistently in the right direction, and strong progressive consensuses have been formed, strengthening every day.
Though the historic effects of racist and patriarchal power structures still stain our society today, and the enemy has not fully surrendered, the war on these forms of hatred is very much being won.
Trans people do not enjoy the same consensus support for their rights, equality, and dignity.
By international standards and comparison to other Western countries, the UK is unusually tolerant and protective of trans rights…
And it could be a lot worse than the last one.
My country has produced yet another very bad variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. (Get your booing out of the way now, because I’m about to ruin your day with some bad news.)
The previous UK variant, which originated in September in Kent, and came to prominence in December when it was discovered to have spread rapidly across London and the South-East even during the November lockdown, was — and remains — challenging.
It is this variant which is now the completely dominant strain across the UK, and spreading at an alarming rate across the big pond and elsewhere. …
The story of American capitalism is of corruption and entrenchment. Robinhood and Wall Street have now taken that to a whole new level.
It’s become something of a cliche, but, unlike many cliches, it is only becoming more true as time goes on: “We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”
It was first said by MLK Jr., and has since been co-opted by many on the left, including Bernie Sanders, who invoked the words at the Democratic primary debate in Nevada last year, as a direct attack on Michael Bloomberg.
It’s a simple, effective dichotomy, but it gets at a deep message and a sinister story, that is at the heart of the history of…
The genocide of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang is a humanitarian atrocity, but too many on the left are turning a blind eye.
As progressives, we avow a single, self-evident principle of human rights: the rights of all people, regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexuality, or nationality, are equal and deserve equal protection under the law.
As such, we feel that the very fundamentals of democracy are attacked when former-President Trump and the GOP buy into anti-Chinese rhetoric, using xenophobic slurs and attacking the Asian community in the West. And we have good cause to be concerned about such rhetoric.
In almost all Western democracies, the already high rates of hate crimes and violence committed against people of Chinese origin have soared…
