Picture Credit: Wiki I like to think I’m as Northern as it comes. I was born overlooking St James Park, and there’s a brick with my name on in the Stadium of Light. There’s not much better than chips and gravy, and I’ll have it with a bit of Henderson’s Relish if you’ve got it, ta. Despite being raised in Jarrow and…
During this pandemic, there’s been many an invocation of Julian of Norwich. She was a Christian mystic, who lived as an anchorite – someone (usually a woman) who would wall themselves off from the world in a literal sense, with prayers for the dead being said as they were bricked into rooms adjoining churches, to meditate upon God and pray for the…
As was probably expected, Open Labour’s pamphlet on foreign policy, launched this week, has caused some controversy. Co-authored by Harry Pitts and Paul Thompson, the pamphlet seeks to develop a new foreign policy for Labour, breaking from the ‘two camps’ mentality and narrowly conceived ‘anti-imperialism’ of the Corbyn leadership, which Pitts and Thompson argue is unsuited to the post-Cold War world. Much…
This article was originally published in Renewal. Social democracy has put down deep roots in British popular culture; this is why Johnson’s government has instinctively favoured social democratic responses to the Covid-19 crisis. This vernacular social democracy is a potent resource which Labour can use to proclaim its vision of the good society. Last year I published a history of post-war England focused…
Bertolt Brecht was one of the most innovative and unique cultural products of “the Left”, his work is the product of lived experiences in Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, the United States, and the German Democratic Republic. Consequently, Brecht, politically and ideologically, inhabits a distinct space that has many lessons for socialism today. Brecht lived through multiple defeats of socialism in an age…
It’s August and, with nothing better to do, Morgan embarks on an epic quest to discover what Modern Monetary Theory is, enlisting the help of trusty companions Megan Corton Scott (fellow-not-knower-of-what-MMT-is), William Sorenson (TSR writer, Labour Tenants), David Klemperer (TSR writer, former Institute for Government researcher) and Shreya Nanda (Economist at the IPPR). iTunes
Harlan Ellison’s 1967 work “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” looms large on the internet. The Hugo award winning short story tells the tale of the only five people left alive after civilisation has been wiped out by a supercomputer called “AM”. Initially a weapons system in an escalated cold war (“Allied Mastercomputer”), AM becomes self aware (and namewise moves…
Image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center We must all have lost count of how many times recently it’s been said that we face an unprecedented crisis. It isn’t exactly true. Arguably human history contains little but precedent: the plague and the Spanish flu have been called upon the most. Perhaps what is unprecedented is our ability to manage the situation, and to…
