“Why do you want Scotland to be independent? You’re English!” These words were spoken to me by my 99-year old Godmother, Auntie Margaret, who has known my Glaswegian mother for the past sixty years and me ever since I was born (including the five years that I was a student at Glasgow University). (More…)
In only a matter of days, Scotland will decide on its future. The Left seems to have lined up behind the Yes-side of the referendum on independence. What is the case for unionism here? Surely, there has to be a progressive angle. After all, the Union stood firm against the rising tide of fascism in the early decades of the twentieth century. What makes it unworthy of progressive politics, now? (More…)
The reactions were predictable. Putin perfunctorily denied it was an invasion, while the media wondered whether it was even right to even call it a war. That Russian forces were already occupying a third of Ukraine was still insufficient evidence. Nearly 15 years from the day when he first too took the reins of the presidency, the ex-KGB agent was living out the wildest of Cold War fantasies (More…)
From Brussels to Turin, the flyers read the same. The 2008 economic crisis continues on, slowly but surely transforming the European Union’s weakest member states into Third World countries in all but name, quasi-colonial holdings of their wealthier neighbors, and the banks bailing them out. (More…)
Operation Protective Edge has claimed its first political casualty. The victim is neither Palestinian, nor Israeli. In a delightfully ironic turn of events, it’s the chief executive of Mandate Palestine’s former colonial parent state, the United Kingdom. Fittingly, David Cameron received the resignation letter of his best-known Muslim minister, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, who quit over his support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza. (More…)
The downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 is America’s fault, I am told. Washington egged on the fascists in Kiev, who were trying to shoot down Vladimir Putin’s plane, but somehow got the wrong one. Everything bad that happens in the world is the United States’ fault. It always is. (More…)
It was only a matter of time before Birmingham’s Muslim minority was thrust into the headlines. The hammer fell when local educational leader Tahir Alam was linked to an alleged “blueprint of Islamization” that would co-opt the city’s schools. It didn’t seem to matter that the entire document may have been a hoax. (More…)
On a hot Monday, I made a call to a woman who was a bridge between Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Minister during the Gorbachev era, to check if the bad news about his possible death was real. “Helena, its true..” She wept. “He died at 12 today.” (More…)
In the late nineties The Cook Report secretly filmed Nick Griffin at a BNP rally. These were the first days of New Labour, when multiculturalism was replacing multiracialism as the umbrella term for diversity and tolerance. In one clip he says, “And they call it multiculturalism, they call it love, they call it respect for others… I’ll tell you what it is, it’s genocide!” (More…)
In 2011, a group of activists splintered from the BNP amidst the infighting which had erupted under Nick Griffin. They soon registered a new party. First it was called the National People’s Party, but it was to be renamed Britain First. Not immediately pursuant of electoral gains, Britain First contented itself as a street pressure group. (More…)
A video by two young men from Cardiff roared through the British media last week. Reyaad Khan and Nasser Muthana talk about how they left the Welsh capital for Syria and Iraq, in order to fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and demand that other British Muslims join them. (More…)
At the foot of the White Cliffs of Dover, the slogan ‘No Border. No Control’ greets those taking the elevator up the bluffs, or viewing them from the Channel. With inimitable frankness, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) displays the same such sentiment to the City of London as well, tucked away a little awkwardly on a brick wall along Great Eastern Street. (More…)