These few paragraphs from my union cut through the BBC furore. To sustain professional, public-interest journalism, its board should be independently appointed (ie no government-placed gentlemen amateurs or ideologues) and its workers should have >25% representation: www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj...

Huge support revealed for 'Zucman tax' on wealth in high-income countries

Genetic determinism provides the same cognitive shortcut as market fundamentalism--a fallacy of composition reduces a complex unity, a social formation, to a simple component (DNA, market exchange): www.newscientist.com/article/2504... Of course, the Nazis believed in their own genetic determinism.

@eppgroup.bsky.social caves in to far right's climate idiocy and corporate worship. Like (Groucho) Marx, Manfred Weber has his principles, but if you don't like those he can show you some others: euobserver.com/Green%20Econ... Whatever happened to Christian democracy and the social-market economy?

Religion is such a force for evil because it provides the perfect basis for narcissistic self-regard among the (particular) 'saved' and demonisation of the 'damned'. As Gramsci wrote, every war is (in some sense) a religious war. Time to imagine a world without it: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/w...

The pandemic revealed how scientific literacy is way too low to arrest the proliferating 'side-effects' of modern capitalism. #Climate scientists are terrified by global heating, yet many--like Trump--don't understand it and find cognitive get-outs ('a hoax'): www.theguardian.com/environment/...

If Trump is brought low by his sleazy misogyny alienating religious conservatives, there'll be a poetic justice to that: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/u...

The EU must not row back on the #GDPR regulation to favour US corporations over European citizens: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Bringing the #gig economy corporations to heel: euobserver.com/Labour/ar180...

The #climate collective-action dilemma means coalitions of the willing and sectoral work programmes must replace inertia. And the #COP must be transformed so the highest common factor, not the lowest common denominator, prevails: www.climatechangenews.com/2025/11/11/n...

Just as in Stalin's time, every new problem Putin's sclerotic dogma creates but cannot solve requires a new scapegoat to blame, until even the most loyal become 'non-persons' too: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Research finds 17-25 year-olds (products of 'social media' and AI) have 45% lower capacity for critical thinking than >46 year-olds (largely socialised pre-internet): www.newscientist.com/article/2501... That (plus neoliberal-induced insecurity) helps explain the rise of populist snake-oil peddling.

On top of filleting the due-diligence directive, @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu is even taking her 'simplification' knife to the widely consensual #GDPR regulation, subordinating the interests of citizens to those of surveillance capitalism: euobserver.com/Digital/ar5e...

@vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu's deregulatory, 'simplification' agenda on corporate reporting and due diligence--reversing in a folie de grandeur what was done in her first term--is so superficial and wilful that it may well be annulled at the European Court of Justice: euobserver.com/Green%20Econ...

Hugely ironic that the crisis at the #BBC over a misleading edit of Trump's remarks on January 6 2021--for which the journalist involved should have been disciplined--has been led all week by newspapers with no commitment whatsoever to fair and accurate reporting: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Putin's neo-Stalinist dictatorship similarly preserves the appearances of legality but the intelligence agencies rule. Unlike in the post-Stalin USSR, no Gorbachev-like reformer could emerge from within the ruling party and any dissident, such as Navalny, is murdered www.euractiv.com/opinion/puti...

Big polluters caused the climate crisis - why should we pay for the impacts while they continue to profit? Join me and add your name to this @friends-earth.bsky.social petition, demand big polluters pay their fair share for a greener future🌍👇 foe.uk/lipp6

The transition from secular republicanism to Catholic nationalism and retreat from enlightenment among Irish Protestants in the latter 19th century made partition inevitable. Only a post-nationalist politics can thus undo it, de facto as well as de jure, today: www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

How when the planet is burning are states unable to transcend the collective-action dilemma of stopping emissions inexorably rising? Because (among other things) the annual COP events have been captured by an army of fossil-fuel lobbyists: www.theguardian.com/environment/... #COP30

Just as it was recognised in the high-growth postwar decades in Europe and the US that high incomes needed to be taxed punitively to deter rent-seeking, so now they and fossil-fuel profits must be taxed punitively to internalise the 'externality' of climate change www.theguardian.com/environment/...

In another sign of the GOP's abandonment of the rule of law under Trump, red-state attorneys general have told Meta to defy as 'anti-American' already-heavily-diluted EU directives from 'Brussels bureaucrats' on corporate reporting and due diligence: euobserver.com/EU%20&%20the... #CSRD #CSDDD

The 'securitisation' of migration in Europe defies practitioners' recognition that regularisation is usually preferable to deportation and that asylum-seekers' non-refoulement rights are in jeopardy. Free movement for, er, white Europeans, is after all celebrated: theconversation.com/we-have-to-r...

@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social is not a one-off. In big cities everywhere the neoliberal marketisation of public goods has created a crisis of #affordability for citizens, for which neither the populists nor centrist politicians have any answers: www.socialeurope.eu/zohran-mamda...

Powerful appeal by leading figures at @eeb.org to stop the stigmatisation of public-spirited #NGOs in the EU--when the real problem is vastly more pervasive corporate lobbying for private ends: euobserver.com/EU%20Politic... #civilsociety

#Inequality widening as 'r>g' (Piketty) worldwide: with the capital share of #income growing at the expense of labour's (including through weaker trade unions), rentiers can salt away more and more #wealth, which their offspring inherit: www.theguardian.com/inequality/2...

Fascinating that >6,000 female footballers globally have selected, via the players' union, a world XI with nine players from England or Spain (in fact Catalonia) and six from Arsenal or Barcelona. Hard to argue with that: www.theguardian.com/football/202... #womensfootball

I have just signed this petition. It's an issue I care about. Will you sign it too? action.wemove.eu/sign/2025-11...

It has never been recognised in the post-Maastricht EU, blinded by orthodo economics, that arbitrary public-spending constraints + central-bank 'independence' mean the union is unable to wield the complementary macroeconomic levers of fiscal and monetary policy: www.socialeurope.eu/europes-defe...

Europe's 'polycrisis' is beyond the power of states to resolve within their national containers. Only a federal Europe, with competences distributed among European, national, regional and local levels and to NGOs, can summon up the knowledge and agency to succeed: www.socialeurope.eu/sovereignism...

The far-right regime in Jerusalem knows perfectly well that it is abrogating human rights and the rule of law in Gaza (and the west bank) and could be held to account by courts in the EU or the US. But that's okay with Google and Amazon: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

One of the most stupid things about the EU rowing back on the corporate due-diligence and reporting regime it had agreed only last term is that EU firms can't compete globally on price, so they need to be incentivised to compete on quality, rights and sustainability: euobserver.com/EU%20Politic...

Meta privately pressed Irish government to push for 'fundamental overhaul' of users' data-protection and privacy regime at EU level, including the fundamental GDPR, unabashedly citing 'economic interest': www.irishtimes.com/technology/b... #data

Offshore #wind (and #solar) power must expand exponentially if energy is to be decarbonised before global ecosystems collapse: theconversation.com/just-1-of-co...

The web's inventor on how it can be seized back from the private 'social media' corporations that have enclosed it, through embedding digital sovereignty for indvidual users, as recent EU regulation--resisted by those corporations--has been groping towards: www.newscientist.com/article/2500...

Hard to credit that we have a Soviet relic in the Kremlin threatening nuclear armageddon & a 1950s throwback in the White House unable to grasp how corporate America has been destroying the ecosphere but 'constructed certitudes' (Beck) have for some a perverse appeal: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/w...

“The climate crisis is an inequality crisis. The very richest individuals in the world are funding and profiting from climate destruction, leaving the global majority to bear the fatal consequences of their unchecked power.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Europe is warming twice as quickly as the global average, yet the right is pushing back on #climate action as huge costs are incurred in health, output and infrastructure--much greater than the necessary mitigation investment--due to heat and extreme weather events euobserver.com/Green%20Econ...

Don't miss the executive summary of this authoritative annual report: the world is heading for the #climate abyss, with backsliding and idiocy amid rising emissions, but civic and local action is pushing the global population to turn away from catastrophe: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Trump's approval rating is already on the same downward path as during his first term, as the most disapproved president ever recorded. His reaction is to become more and more outraged and brutal, which will only compound the slide as he abandons all legal constraint: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/u...

Very useful survey of the patchy nature of sex education in schools across Europe--with, as ever, religious authorities favouring ignorance and 'tradition' over science and humanism: euobserver.com/Health%20&%2...

Despite the ceasefire deal--and the famine, trauma, homelessness and destitution--Israel's far-right government is still denying access to Gaza to the vast majority of NGO humanitarian aid aiming to enter the strip: euobserver.com/EU%20&%20the...

The far right has risen by adding to individual 'authoritarian personalities' those rendered socially insecure by neoliberalism. The postwar western-European lesson that markets must be socially embedded to marginalise #fascism must, tragically, be relearned: theloop.ecpr.eu/rising-inequ...

It's often forgotten that the real fear of nuclear holocaust in the Euromissiles crisis of the 1980s, when there was a far-right idiot in the White House, only receded when a reform-communist replaced cold-war antagonism in the Kremlin. Now a cold-warrior is back: www.irishtimes.com/world/europe...

By and large, Labour's members want it to be a broad European social-democratic party, allied to political liberals and greens. Their inward-looking, small-c conservative leader is however talking to a smaller and smaller audience and so electoral disaster: www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Like Tony Blair, Keir Starmer is a lawyer who has no social-science knowledge yet thinks this allows him to run a presidential-style administration. And he not only supports 'growth' without ecological awareness but, also like Blair, is naively 'pro-business': www.opendemocracy.net/en/labour-co...

A comprehensive survey of the hybrid war to divide and disorient Europe promoted by the ex-KGB agent in the Kremlin, dreaming of restoring the Soviet 'sphere of influence' and cold-war parity with the US: www.irishtimes.com/world/europe...

Europe's Real Security Crisis: Why Social And Ecological Protection Must Unite www.socialeurope.eu/europes-real...

Putin's spy network in Europe shows he basically sees the EU and NATO as the Russian state's enemies in an undeclared hybrid war: euobserver.com/EU%20&%20the...

Let's never fail to be astonished that @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu is so enamoured of handing €7bn+ of European taxpayers' money to the Egyptian dictatorship--so refugees cannot cross the Mediterranean from Egypt, in the absence of safe legal routes, to seek asylum: euobserver.com/EU%20&%20the...

Sometimes things are done in Ireland that look very jejeune to a wider western-European audience--such as being starry-eyed towards big US corporations: euobserver.com/Digital/ar6c...