On 5th August 2019 children’s A&E services in South Tyneside Hospital will close between the hours of 10pm and 8am. Local health bodies have carried out an astonishing mass leafleting and advertising campaign to keep children away from the hospital. As a result thousands of very sick children from one of the poorest areas of […]

Last year we had an extremely polarized election, certainly the most polarized since the end of a dictatorship that lasted more than twenty years, from 1964 to 1985. From 1985 to 2013, Brazilian democracy went through a period of steady consolidation. In 2013, however, the scenario began to change. Perspectives on what would have happened […]

The last year has been an encouraging one for the Green movement. Greta Thunberg's campaign and the school strikes, the publicity attracting to David Attenborough's Blue Planet – and increasing numbers of adverse-weather-related events – appear finally to have had some impact on public awareness of the climate emergency. The emergence of Extinction Rebellion (XR) […]

It's a sign of the times that academia is increasingly joining the movement to think seriously about capitalism and what might replace it. While in earlier periods of crisis many scholars thought it their role to engage in this way, during the 'Third Way' Blair/Clinton years of the 1990s and early 2000s – when I […]

In the small mining town of Brumadinho in southeastern Brazil, the Córrego do Feijão tailings dam owned by Vale, the largest iron ore producer in the world, collapsed on January 25, 2019. It unleashed a tsunami of toxic mud packed with iron ore rejects, killing at least 270 people, and causing widespread environmental damage. The […]

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted in 2015 by the United Nations and its member states as an ambitious programme “to promote shared prosperity and well-being for all over the next 15 years”. Two new reports, on food security and education, cast serious doubt on their capacity to meet their goals, just four years […]