Preparing government responses to reports from Parliamentary inquiries often involves finding a plausible excuse to reject a perfectly sensible suggestion. The Department of Health and Aged Care failed this task in its response to the House of Representatives Long COVID inquiry. The inquiry began in September 2022 and received almost 600 submissions. It held four Continue reading »
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While it is highly likely net migration is now past its peak and declining, the data to this stage suggests it may only be falling gradually. Permanent and long-term movements are the earliest approximation of net migration that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) publishes. The data for December shows net permanent and long-term movements Continue reading »
The invasion of Gaza, described by Pope Francis as ‘terrorism’, is causing strained relationships between Israel and the Vatican. One of the longest-term supporters of the Palestinians is the Holy See, the Vatican. Although the number of Christians in Palestine is small – 2.5% of the population of the West Bank (50,000), about 1,100 in Continue reading »
We are homo dramatis, the species that tells stories. Today more and more of us are rejecting America and Israel’s stories and are searching for a better script. That is a good thing because History is calling us to be actors, not spectators, in the drama playing out in Gaza. There is a revealing moment Continue reading »
From the man who runs 538 since Nate Silver left:
In 2021, standing in front of various pieces of machinery at an aircraft factory in Bristol, Labour leader Keir Starmer rolled up his sleeves and laid out his pitch to the country. Its headline feature: a politics which ‘treads lightly’ on our lives. Before his death in 2011, political scientist Peter Mair identified a democratic […]
When I was appointed editor of Tribune in 1992, not on the basis of my experience but principally because I was not the candidate supported by Peter Mandelson, I received three telephone calls inviting me over for tea and a chat. The first was from Tony Benn. I went to knock on his door at […]
A despairing leftish Labour MP leaned heavily against the parapet of the Thames-side Commons Terrace and sighed: ‘Leadership is all a matter of political will, isn’t it?’ It was the day after Keir Starmer had valorised Margaret Thatcher in the latest cack-handed bid to woo Tory voters. As the polls continued to signal a tsunamic […]
In 1983, Arthur Scargill addressed a Labour meeting at the Victoria Club, a miners’ haunt in the pit village of Murton. Joining him was local MP and fifth-generation-miner John Cummings, as well as a young parliamentarian recently elected to represent the nearby constituency of Sedgefield, Tony Blair. Though 1983 would be a year of historic […]
The National Health Service is enduring yet another disastrous winter, with shortages of staff, facilities, and funding. After thirteen years of austerity, it is clear that the situation facing the health service following the next election will be far worse than the mess left behind in 1997 by the Thatcher and Major governments. Tony Blair’s […]
As we move into a new year, the world’s economic forecasters are consulting their crystal balls, and the picture seems mixed. Most of the world’s largest financial institutions anticipate falls in both inflation and headline rates of economic growth for the advanced economies. Economists at Deutsche Bank predict recessions in both the US and the […]
The year was 1997. Bill Clinton was beginning his second term; Tony Blair’s New Labour was coming to power after a resounding victory; and European Union member states were putting together the Stability and Growth Pact (vowing to keep government deficits below 3 percent and debt below 60 percent of GDP). Meanwhile, Alan Blinder was asking the […]
In the average British home of the 2020s, the furniture is, very often, grey. Grey chairs, grey carpets, grey sofas. Walls everywhere are grey. The cars on the roads tend to be some form of grey. Bestselling works of erotic fiction detail the many fascinating shades between ‘vanilla’ sexual mores and apparently darker ones. At […]
On 20 August 1948, Tribune published probably the most shameful editorial in its long, generally proud history. The editorial was entitled ‘Let’s Stay in Africa’. Do we want to stay in Africa? That is the first question to settle. And to that question we reply with an unhesitating ‘Yes’. We want to stay in Africa […]
Thurston Moore was there. In his newly released memoir, Sonic Life, the guitarist and vocalist of the iconic Sonic Youth provides an eyewitness catalogue of over thirty-five years of underground culture, from his first teenage beers at CBGB music club to the messy dissolution of the band in 2010. Moore’s memoir is a personal history […]
MintPress uncovers the web of influence connecting NCRI to the Israel lobby and the US national security state, shedding light on questionable methodologies and raising crucial questions about the true nature of their 'neutral' research.
The post NCRI Exposed: Israel Lobby-Linked Group Tied to Illegal Settlements and Campus Censorship appeared first on MintPress News.
Better unwoke than woke It’s one thing to watch a Terry Gilliam film. It’s another to live inside one. But the white, Christian-nationalist MAGA right wants to. And a child named Tucker will lead them. Friends circulated this Gerard Baker op-ed from Monday’s Wall Street Journal mocking Tucker Carlson’s fawning, America-hating profile of life in Russia: Why can’t we be more like Russia? The minute you see the welcoming smiles on the faces of the kindly immigration guards, all spiffy in their shiny jackboots, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport you realize that unlike our own morally louche, spiritually decrepit cesspit, run by a corrupt and brutal regime bent on destroying its opponents, Russia is a nation united around a vision of the historic greatness of its civilization. From state-of-the-art supermarket cart technology to a president who is youthful and vigorous, able to dilate on European history at length, the contrast couldn’t be greater with a technologically backward and collapsing U.S. in the grip of a geriatric autocrat who can’t remember what day it is. American capitalism is corrupt and exploitative.
The suspicious death of the Russian opposition activist and behaviour over his remains shows little has changed in the Kremlin
At an East London cinema last summer, several dozen people in their late sixties and early seventies took to the stage. After being beckoned forwards by the compere, the veteran South African revolutionary Ronnie Kasrils, the shying group of mostly retirees received repeated standing ovations from loved ones, politicians, and diplomats filling out the private […]
In 2014, Mark Fisher and I wrote a 12,000-word pamphlet called Reclaim Modernity: Beyond Markets, Beyond Machines. This paper was published by Compass, a progressive think tank and lobby group. Tribune has asked me to write something about the genesis, contents, and implications of the pamphlet, so I’ll do my best here to explain where […]
The date is 14 December 2023, and the venue is Oyoun. Louna Sbou needs a moment. On the stage at a hastily organised press conference, she is flanked by colleagues who look stricken as she buries her head in her hands and weeps. Above Louna’s head is a slideshow documenting events and performances at Oyoun, […]