If you want to better understand the psychology & appeal of Boris Johnson, & gain insight into the powerful network of privately educated elites who are wrecking Britain, read Sarah Lyall's conversation with John le Carré & Ben Macintyre.
Danny, a leading expert on housing, health, employment, education & poverty, has published with colleagues more than a dozen books on issues related to UK social inequalities, & several hundred journal papers - which is probably why he's so rarely on TV.
Middle England has been hit hard by the #costoflivingcrisis. Even people doing comparatively well are struggling.
Across Britain, opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Pre-COVID, life expectancy dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since the 1930s.
The hateful anonymous @X account @benonwine constantly tweets out divisive, inflammatory far-right pro-Farage tweets.
Because it's impossible to find out who is behind the grotesque account, we cannot know who, or what, is behind it. It's the same for @UKUpdates_co_uk.
Now that all the main parties have published their manifestos, rather than actually read them, the overwhelming majority of voters will rely on (almost invariably partisan) third-party accounts to summarise and/or interpret them.
But how accurate & reliable is their analysis?
In 2019, in 'The explosion of the public sphere', Dr Martin Moore (Centre for the Study of Media Communication & Power at Kings College) & Dr Gordon Ramsay (University of Westminster) outlined recent developments in our insufficiently regulated UK media.
A research paper from the University of Greenwich, 'The case for a progressive annual #WealthTax in the UK' (updated 12th June 2024), analyses the revenue potential of a progressive annual net wealth tax on the top 1% in the UK...
A progressive net wealth tax is a tax on the stock of net wealth (assets minus liabilities), that is designed to raise revenues primarily from only the very wealthiest individuals, primarily to fund public & other essential services, which benefit *everyone*.
#TaxTheRich
The authors present a baseline progressive net wealth tax that only taxes the top 1% wealthiest individuals. Individuals with net wealth above £2.2M (the top 1%) are taxed at a marginal rate of 1%; above £3.6M (the top 0.5%) at 2%, & above £11.2M (the top 0.1%) at 4%.
#TaxTheRich
Today, you might get the impression from news and social media that the far-right has 'taken over' the EU, which is in its death throws: the evidence does not support this view: nationalist/populist hard/far-right parties are on course to get just a quarter of EU seats.
Hard/far-right parties have made not insignificant gains in several countries across the EU, not least France, Italy, Germany & Austria, producing uncertainty about the EU - and Europe's - political direction & future.
However, it's certainly not the landslide you may think.
Europe's nationalist parties have capitalised in the EU Parliament election on voter disquiet over spiralling prices, migration, & the cost of the green transition & will seek to translate their seat gains into influence on EU policy - basically Reform UK's policy platform.
We face housing & climate crises, not migrant & overcrowding crises.
We need more affordable housing, but health is often forgotten about in housing policies. Amid the clamour for economic growth & house building targets, housing quality loses out. Decent regulations & standards are often derided as unnecessary 'red tape'.
In 2022, 'political risk & intelligence analyst' & Egyptian immigrant to the UK, Khaled Hassan, explained in a podcast hosted by the controversial UK-based Campaign Against Antisemitism why he, now 'a proud Jew', converted from Islam to Judaism.
In March 2022, The Jewish Chronicle featured Hassan, describing him as a "hero moderator" of @YouTube videos, "who dared to speak up (but) was silenced as Whistleblower".
He described what he perceived to be as YouTube's failure to remove hateful videos.