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…
With workplaces across the country now reopening, we are officially moving to the next stage of lockdown. This raises several issues, not least because Covid-19 has yet to be eliminated, but namely the economic reality we find ourselves in will acutely affect working parents. Childcare provision was inconspicuously absent from the Chancellor’s Summer Statement, provoking outcry from MPs, business groups and campaigners.…
Photo Credit: Tejvan Pettinger In the U.K, bicycle use peaked in 1952 and has been in permanent decline since. We are outflanked by our European neighbours when it comes to levels of cycling, yet the British and the bike are not natural antagonists. Certain media outlets and politicians may help to drive such attitudes from drivers, but this largely stems from being…
Picture Credit: M J Richardson After a brief hiatus, politics is back in full flow. Normal disputes have replaced the relative unity of the first weeks of lockdown. But we can be sure that post-pandemic politics will not look the same as the politics we left behind. The coronavirus pandemic has impacted the lives of millions of people and will undoubtedly inform…
If you’re the type that engages with contemporary left theory, chances are you’ll be familiar with “capitalist realism”; Mark Fisher’s idea that neoliberal capitalism has done such a number on our capacity for radical imagination that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. However, the affliction of the contemporary left (here covering everything…
“I think we made mistakes in the eighties. With hindsight, I don’t think we helped ourselves. We allowed ourselves to be marginalised; we were too unforgiving of people who some saw as betraying our principles and didn’t give them a way back. My view has always been that if you don’t take the mainstream of the Labour Party with you, you’re going…
Keir Starmer’s arrival as leader of the Labour Party will, of course, shift many of the political co-ordinates. Labour’s institutional setting will look different under a new leadership. But the case Labour has staked out in the last four years – opposing austerity, raising taxes on the richest, supporting a far wider role for the state in the economy – now, under…
For all the talk of big tent politics, the term ‘Soft Left’ has become a tent so large that it has collapsed in the middle, and runs the risk of smothering those inside. Given that we at the Social Review are often accused of being the Pravda of the Soft Left, it is perhaps worth setting out a clearer definition of what…
