NewsTrust - United Kingdom - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

We need to talk about masculinity

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Laurie Penny - May. 17 (Opinion) - The crisis facing men and boys cannot be solved by reviving the tired stereotypes that oppress and constrain them We need to talk about masculinity. Across a country torn by recession and struggling to adapt to social change, men and boys are feeling lost and powerless, unsure what the future holds and what role they might play in it. Most feel as if they're not allowed to question what it means to be a man today – or discuss what it might mean tomorrow. The Labour MP Diane Abbott, launching a new campaign this week, is not the first person to kick up a fuss about this "crisis of masculinity". In a speech to the thinktank Demos on Thursday she said that millions of young men are in distress, acting out violently or sinking into depression. Unfortunately, the only solution many in the audience could offer is not giving men and boys more power over their own lives, but restoring their traditional power over women, as "breadwinners" and "male providers". Nobody seems to have bothered to ask ...

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Climate change: swift political action can avert a carbon dioxide crisis

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - May. 12 (Editorial) - Carbon dioxide levels have reached an all-time high. But there is some hope if governments take the figures seriously The news that concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere reached a level of 400 parts per million last week might not appear to have immediate significance. The level is only a couple of units higher than last year, after all. Yet the development has undoubted importance. With the realisation that carbon dioxide levels have achieved that symbolic 400ppm figure, it is now clear that two decades of warnings from scientists have fallen on deaf ears and that our leaders have failed completely to curtail rising outputs of greenhouse gases across the world. Indeed, they have allowed them to accelerate. In the 1960s, levels rose at 0.7ppm a year. Today, they rise at 2.1ppm, as more and more nations become industrialised and increase outputs from their factories and power plants. As a result, the most conservative of scientific calculations suggest Earth now faces a 50-50 ...

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Is Cameron's Britain what we fought for in the war?

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Harry Leslie Smith - May. 09 (Opinion) - At 90 I'm too old to fight those who seek to wreck the civilisation we shed blood, sweat, and tears for in the second world war Every year, the spring rains fall hard and heavy to a parched and hungry earth. Life is reborn from the long slumber of winter. For me the beauty in this annual transformation stings as if I caught my finger on a thorn from a rose. These lengthening days remind me of another time, when I was a young man. Back then the sun's rays were just as warm and sensuous but the splendour of nature being reborn was tainted with death. It was 1945, and Europe was still caught in the dying grasps of a cruel and unforgiving world war . It was a conflict that consumed tens of millions of lives through military battles, air bombardment and pure and simple mass murder. For five years of war, through defeat and bitter struggle, the calendar changed from humid summers to crisp fall days, to the bitterness of winter and then back to the optimism of spring. As clocks in every household ...

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The Kilburn Manifesto: our challenge to the neoliberal victory

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Stuart Hall - Apr. 24 (Opinion) - Elites are using the crisis of global capital to reassert power. But this is no time for retreat. Our manifesto outlines the alternative The crisis in the global economic system triggered by the banking collapse of 2006-08 has precipitated a new moment in the evolution of global capitalism. But its novelty is not generally understood. Some previous crises, most famously the great crash and depression of the 1930s, produced radical social change: the welfare state and New Deal , as well as the rise of fascism. In the past five years protest groups such as Occupy have appeared, and resistance to austerity has grown. Yet there has been no rupture in the system or its governing ideology. Indeed, elites have used the crisis in Europe and north America to advance the neoliberal project, as unrelenting attacks on living standards, the NHS and the welfare state in Britain show. The disintegration of the British postwar settlement was the central project of one of the new right's most politically ...

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Burn our planet or face financial meltdown. Not much of a choice

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Will Hutton - Apr. 21 (Opinion) - Last week's collapse of a European carbon emissions scheme makes an agreed approach to climate change all the more urgent The world is going to fry – unless there is change soon. There is weakening political will to make national and international targets for carbon reduction stick, no strong business and financial coalition prepared to lead and a weakening groundswell of public opinion prepared to foot the bill. Instead, the international consensus of 25 years ago – that the world must act to challenge climate change – is dissolving. Individual countries are trying to steal a march on each other in a race to the bottom, dropping whatever scant penalties there have been for burning fossil fuels. This new political geography has been obvious ever since the Copenhagen talks collapsed in 2009 , but last week the speed with which ground is being lost became sickeningly obvious. The European parliament refused to back a stop-gap measure to save the European carbon emissions trading scheme. ...

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Sotheby's Auction Boosts Indian Art Sales

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Gayatri Rangachari Shah - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - India Ink: Sotheby’s Auction Boosts Indian Art Sales

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Thatcher funeral drama: You're not invited

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Yahoo! News - Apr. 11 (Comment) - Britain has decided not to invite Argentine President Cristina Fernandez.

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Margaret Thatcher’s revolution

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By David Ignatius - Apr. 09 (Comment) - People talk about transformational politicians. But watching Margaret Thatcher take down the British class system was an education in how it’s really done. It required the radical vision and iron will of someone who genuinely abhorred the status quo. Read full article >>

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Op-Ed Columnist: Insurance and Freedom

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 01:19:00 -0700

New York Times - By By PAUL KRUGMAN - Apr. 08 (Opinion) - President Obama will soon release a new budget, and the commentary is already flowing fast and furious. Progressives are angry (with good reason) over proposed cuts to Social Security; conservatives are denouncing the call for more revenues. But it’s all

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Editorial: Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By By THE EDITORIAL BOARD - Apr. 08 (Editorial) - A leader who transformed Britain by pushing the nation in new directions.

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US Moves Toward Teaching Climate Change; Britain Does the Opposite

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Christopher F. Schuetze - Apr. 08 (Opinion) - One conservative leader calls the change “unscientific speculation and hype” as some U.S. states seek to teach “both sides” in the climate debate.

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UK locks up people who want to save the planet

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Andrew Simms - Apr. 03 (Opinion) - The climate campaigners should be given a medal for their outstanding bravery and public service, not prison sentences What if, instead of giving Marie Curie and Alexander Fleming Nobel prizes for their life-saving work on radiation and penicillin, they'd been thrown in jail? Or, instead of being awarded the Grand Croix of the Légion d'honneur for his work on the germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur was imprisoned like Napoleon on Elba? It would be perverse to return the favour of great, public works by depriving people of their freedom. Yet that is just what we're doing in Britain right now. The contributions of the people above were remarkable, but how much greater is the challenge of preserving a readily habitable climate, and how thankful should we be to those prepared to throw their life's energy and creativity at the task? The answer according to the British establishment currently is not at all. Their response is the kind of gratitude a Caesar might hand-out to an innocent ...

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Hot Money Blues

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Mar. 25 (Opinion) - It will mark the end of an era for Cyprus, which has in effect spent the past decade advertising itself as a place where wealthy individuals who want to avoid taxes and scrutiny can safely park their money, no questions asked. But it may also mark at least the beginning of the end for something much bigger: the era when unrestricted movement of capital was taken as a desirable norm around the world.

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Time to Revive the Financial Transaction Tax

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Jesse Eisinger - Feb. 06 (Opinion) - A financial transactions tax would take a 3-cent nip out of every $100 traded, and raise billions. The burden of proof is on opponents to explain how so slender a tax could harm the capital markets.

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Cameron must add climate to G8 priorities

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Caroline Lucas - Jan. 11 (Comment) - The prime minister must use the leadership of the G8 as an opportunity to demonstrate that the UK can be taken seriously as a responsible player on the global stage.

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'Pitbull UK' deplored by top MEP

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - Jan. 11 (Comment) - The leader of the UK Conservative MEPs says Eurosceptic rhetoric suggests a "snarling" Britain isolated in Europe.

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Break the grip of corporate power to secure our future

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By George Monbiot - Dec. 04 (Opinion) - Humankind's greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that man-made climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it. Neoliberalism , also known as market fundamentalism or laissez-faire economics, purports to liberate the market from political interference. The state, it asserts, should do little but defend the realm, protect private property and remove barriers to business. In practice it looks nothing like this. What neoliberal theorists call shrinking the state looks more like shrinking democracy: reducing the means by which citizens can restrain the power of the elite.

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US economy depends on the success of Walmart workers' Black Friday strike

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Robert Reich - Nov. 22 (Opinion) - A half-century ago, America's largest private-sector employer was General Motors, whose full-time workers earned an average hourly wage of around $50, in today's dollars, including health and pension benefits. Today, America's largest employer is Walmart, whose average employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart's employees work fewer than 28 hours per week and do not qualify for benefits. There are many reasons for the difference – including globalization and technological changes that have shrunk employment in American manufacturing, while enlarging it in sectors involving personal services, such as retail. But one reason, closely related to this seismic shift, is the decline of labor unions in the United States. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today, fewer than 7% do. As a result, the typical American worker no longer ...

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Ann Romney's horse fails to win dressage but avoids offending British

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Sam Jones - Aug. 02 - Rafalca, owned by Mrs Mitt Romney, was impeccably behaved and well received by Olympic equestrians in Greenwich Short of mocking Shetland ponies over their lack of stature or laying into zebras for their failure to make a significant contribution to the world of equine culture, Ann Romney's horse Rafalca was always going to struggle to match the sheer incredulity that her husband managed to provoke on his recent overseas trip . And in the event – the event in question being the individual dressage – the 15-year-old bay Oldenburg mare acquitted herself rather well. True, she and her rider, Jan Ebeling, may have been left well behind by Britain's Carl Hester , Germany's Dorothee Schneider and Denmark's Anna Kasprzak but, by Romney standards, her performance was a positive triumph. Never for a second during her seven-minute performance did a hoof stray dangerously mouthwards, nor did she do anything at all to offend or upset the host nation. From the moment she entered the Greenwich Park ...

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Opening Ceremony London 2012: Did director take shot at US on health care?

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - Jul. 28 - The director of the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Games created a production for the 99 percent, it seems. For an Olympic movement that hates controversy, that is unusual. ...

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After 800 years, the barons are back in control of Britain | George Monbiot

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By George Monbiot - Jul. 17 (Comment) - The Magna Carta forced King John to give away powers. But big business now exerts a chilling grip on the workforce Hounded by police and bailiffs, evicted wherever they stopped, they did not mean to settle here. They had walked out of London to occupy disused farmland on the Queen's estates surrounding Windsor Castle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that didn't work out very well. But after several days of pursuit, they landed two fields away from the place where modern democracy is commonly supposed to have been born. At first this group of mostly young, dispossessed people, who (after the 17th century revolutionaries ) call themselves Diggers 2012, camped on the old rugby pitch of Brunel University's Runnymede campus . It's a weed-choked complex of grand old buildings and modern halls of residence, whose mildewed curtains flap in the wind behind open windows, all mysteriously abandoned as if struck by a plague or a neutron bomb. The diggers were evicted again, and moved down the hill ...

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Nick Clegg backs benefit cuts for better-off pensioners

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Juliette Jowit - Jun. 07 () - Intervention comes after reports that Iain Duncan Smith is pressing for cuts to £5bn bill for elderly benefits The row over providing benefits such as winter fuel payments and free bus passes for better-off pensioners has split the very top of the coalition government, with deputy prime minister Nick Clegg telling colleagues he would be happy to see them dramatically cut. The Liberal Democrat leader's intervention comes after reports on Wednesday that the work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith is pressing for cuts to the £5bn bill for elderly benefits , which also include free TV licences and prescriptions. However, David Cameron is said to be adamant that he must stick to the promise he made before the last general election that the payments would be safe under a Tory government, a promise considered important enough to be enshrined in the coalition agreement. The Lib Dems said in their election manifesto they would delay the politically sensitive winter fuel payments until the ...

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Letters: Shale gas could fracture our renewables policy

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Apr. 24 - It beggars belief that fracking is recommended to be extended and earthquakes the only risk taken into account ( Gas fracking gets the green light , 17 April). Other risks are not just theoretical; appalling consequences have already happened on a wide scale in the US. Fracking has been carried out in rural areas where people's off-grid water supplies have been made unusable by pollution. There have been cases where people cannot use water from the tap at the kitchen sink because methane comes with it, with the risk of explosions. Only half the chemical-laden water used in the process is recovered. It is then kept in lagoons on the surface where it is allowed to evaporate volatile toxic chemicals into the air. We cannot afford the risk to our water supplies. We don't have the open spaces which have been affected in the US. Even now we are faced with water restrictions and drought. We don't have the necessary huge quantities of water available to be used and made dirty for ever. The landscape ...

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A better understanding of Iran might save us from catastrophe

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Peter Beaumont - Mar. 11 (Opinion) - As Israel plays up the country's nuclear threat, the west should be seeking active dialogue with Tehran "Actions," said Samuel Johnson in his life of the English poet Abraham Cowley, "are visible." What are secret, Johnson added pointedly, are "motives". In the case of Iran's nuclear programme what we know of Tehran's actions and motives are the following. With some degree of "overall credibility" – according to the 2011 board of governors' report from the International Atomic Energy Agency – we know that Tehran, in all likelihood, made active studies of technologies associated with nuclear weapon design and payload design. By and large, the report believes, that activity ceased in 2003, coincident with the US-led invasion of Iraq. We know, too, because it has been even more visible, that Iran has come close to mastering the nuclear fuel cycle as well, including enrichment of uranium up to 20%. The problem with the present dangerous debate, as it has been framed ever-more closely ...

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Op-Ed Columnist: What Ails Europe?

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Feb. 26 (Opinion) - The two common explanations — call it the Republican narrative and the German narrative — are just wrong.

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