Putin is still selling to the West as if nothing has changed — Above ground, in Ukraine, there is the horror of human beings being massacred by the thousands, yet through the pipelines that go across its soil, the gas pumps through as if nothing has changed. Above ground, in Poland, hundreds of thousands of people are becoming refugees, but oil and gas…

Plutonomy + Purchased Populism = Economic Fascism — We like to see many of the events of the last five years as focused on personalities: Obama led to Trump, whose nature of division led to the splintering of the country. But, what if Trump and the possible future breakdown of the US democratic union are more the logical…

Will UK Conservative parliamentarians show more spine than Republican members of Congress? — The prime minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, appears, prima facie, to have broken the law. The report by the Cabinet Office has been released in a much-reduced form after the intervention of the Metropolitan Police (think Mueller/AG Barr). However, the report is damning, I mean really damning, stating there…

And Ukraine being Putin’s popularity panic button — Regardless of what happens in Ukraine in the next few weeks, after the poisoning of political opponents, the funding of campaigns to undermine democracy and the general policy, of levelling down of all those who dare oppose their new Tsar’s will; hopefully, finally, the people and governments of the world’s…

Oh, and international treaties mean jack s**t — By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was collapsing as hope was rising across the newly formed, or reborn, countries of Eastern Europe. The expectation of a future free from Russian occupation accompanied the dream of rejoining the rest of the world from behind the stifling Iron Curtain. And…

How long is it since you actually wrote things down? I mean, wrote on paper words to make a sentence, sentences to make a paragraph? At first, I had to learn to write again. The letters had become jagged scribbles, ineligible scrawl. My fingers no longer knew the detailed process…

How a novel written in 1960 gave me new insight of the politics of today — I was reading Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman to get away from the constant hum of the present-day news cycle. Set in WWII and centred around the battle of Stalingrad, it is a book that is beautiful and tragic in equal share. But, halfway through its 853 pages, there…

The one question Moderates must answer is, why this time will be different? — Many reasons can be given as to why Trump rose to power; one of the most accepted is that communities across whole swathes of the US have felt forgotten, not invested in and like they were left to rot as businesses and jobs moved elsewhere. This rot has happened slowly…

The Pandora Papers now follow the Panama Papers, which followed the loan scandal of the mega-rich: If we don’t know the problem now, we never will. …