United Kingdom

Posted by: John Phoenix Britain has some of the best agricultural land in the world, so why is it that more than one third of the food consumed here is imported? The headline figure from a 2024 report issued by Defra (the Department for the Environment, Food, Rural and Agricultural affairs), is that only 62% of the food consumed here is actually grown here. This is the lowest it has been for some time, falling from 80% in 1945 (1). To understand what is driving this, and crucially how the political economy of capitalist agriculture has necessarily created such a situation, we first need to understand exactly what the figures represent. The 62% is a ‘production to supply ratio’ and there are two things to bear in mind. Firstly it uses the market prices of commodities, this means ...

By: John Phoenix Reform are currently heading opinion polls, with 28% of people indicating their intention to vote for Reform at the next General Election. Of course, the next General Election is not expected until 2029 and opinion polls are designed not as much to gauge opinions as to form them. It could also be argued that Reform’s ‘lead’ in the opinion polls has been manufactured alongside the fomenting of anti-immigrant sentiment to stoke division within the working class. That said, the party’s rise from its small beginnings as a party of resistance against the bureaucracy of the European Union to a potential party of government has been striking, but, given the parlous state of the ruling class’s preferred parties of rule – the Conservatives and Labour (in that order o...

By: Ron Unz  Audio Player 00:00 00:00 Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume. For more than thirty years, I’d occasionally come across harsh attacks against a British historian named John Charmley for writing a highly-critical biography of Winston Churchill, the famed British leader, and that was about the only thing I knew of that author. I’d always vaguely wondered exactly what he’d said about Churchill that had infuriated so many others, and whether his criticism had been warranted, but never had enough of an interest in the topic to investigate it. Then a year or two ago, I finally got around to ordering Churchill: The End of Glory from Amazon, with a mint copy of his original hardcover edition offered at an extremely a...

Posted by: John Phoenix On the morning of Thursday 13 March, ‘Labour’ Prime Minister Keir Starmer assembled the national media and began lifelessly intoning his keynote policy speech that had been billed as announcing a ‘bonfire of the quangos.’ He opened with his usual refrain of making “change in the country” as “working people do not feel like the state and public services are working for them.” Indeed! He moved directly to the NHS and cited its management body NHS England (NHSE – introduced by the Health and Social Care Act as recently as 2012) as an example of “duplication of bureaucracy”, before announcing it would be abolished, and, even as the watching nation was thinking ‘what on earth does that mean?’, went on to assert that the NHS is being “brought back under democr...