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Call Me By Your Name (Keith)

I like to think of myself as a young, hip and culturally au fait person who understands the lingo, political and otherwise. We all like to think of ourselves in ways that may not be entirely accurate, and we all have things in our lives – drinks we can’t drink anymore, jeans that don’t fit, songs we don’t understand, celebrities and, increasingly,…

Interviews, Liberation, Podcasts, Realities 24th November 2020

The Social Review Podcast Episode 63: Jewish Labour (with Peter Mason)

We’re back! Jasper chats to Peter Mason, National Secretary of the Jewish Labour Movement, to delve into the EHRC’s Report on antisemitism within Labour, its long-term history and why left wing thought is susceptible to it plus the future for JLM, and much more. iTunes

Beyond the UK, Realities, Strategy 13th November 2020

Reflections on the US Election

My grandmother was already wrapped up in the world of Fox news during the Bush era. An immigrant herself, she was targeted over the last five years with Pro-Trump Spanish language content around the clock on Facebook and Whatsapp. New research by MIT and others has recorded how conservative activists are pushing this content to reach Latino voters across the United States.…

Beyond Westminster, History, Realities, Reviews, Strategy 2nd November 2020

Review: Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London by Owen Hatherley

Red Metropolis is a strange book, largely because, somewhat by its own admission, it’s not really a book at all: it’s somewhere between an overgrown essay and a coping mechanism. This is not to say that it is bad (quite the contrary: it is good) but to say that it is somewhat hard to pin down, accordingly, somewhat hard to write about.…

Culture, Ideas, Realities, Reviews 25th October 2020

Books that Informed Our Politics: The Carbon Diaries

One of mine and my friend Beth’s favourite pastimes is talking about all the weird, ill conceived and forgotten novels, primarily fantasy and dystopia, that we read as children and young teenagers. We were both extremely bookish in the way that only adolescents can be, reading indiscriminately and without coming up for air, plundering book shops, school and local libraries. Born two…

History, Realities, Strategy, Within Westminster 23rd October 2020

People Like Us: Our Leaders and the Politics of Ordinariness

In contemporary Britain, political leaders are sewn into our cultural fabric and their attempts to don a guise of demotic accessibility seem commonplace and expected. Perhaps most explicitly, and contradictorily, Boris Johnson has used this strategy of appearing as ‘one of us’ to gain the trust of large swathes of his electorate, claiming to represent the apathetic sentiment of anti-Establishment politics which…