The UK is facing a “terrifying” “crisis point” in abortion provision, experts say, with rising demand & restricted access to care in many areas putting unprecedented pressure on struggling #NHS services.
Tory donors who have collectively given the party more than £21MILLION since 2001 have been declared as the ultimate owners of UK properties held through more than 150 offshore companies.
The @BBC chair & Sunak’s old boss Richard Sharp, more than 20 other Tory donors, & a string of billionaires are among those who have declared they own UK property through offshore jurisdictions - presumably for the sole purpose of avoiding paying UK tax.
Sharp "has been thinking about how to provide for his children on his death. This arrangement isn’t about a personal tax benefit to him as he pays more UK tax under this arrangement, but about him planning for provision for his children."
A survey commissioned in 2019 revealed the shocking result that over half of British people did not know that at least six millions Jews had been murdered during the #Holocaust.
The #Holocaust, as a topic, has been part of the national curriculum in England & Wales since its creation in 1991. The 2014 iteration of the national curriculum has the Holocaust as a firm part of key stage 3 history – compulsory for all 11 to 14-year-olds in state schools.
However, research into what school pupils in England know about the #Holocaust shows that - like swathes of the adult population who are subject to highly partisan & divisive newspapers - they lack knowledge about its context.
The #PREVENT Review was announced in 2019. Like the controversial Race Report, the Social Mobility Commission, & so much else, it's an ideological stitch up, headed by ex-director of the hard-right anti-Muslim Henry Jackson Society, William Shawcross.
A draft of the "independent" #PREVENT review, led by William Shawcross, made the dangerously irresponsible claim that 'The Govt’s counter-terrorism programme has been too focused on right-wing extremism & should now crack down on Islamist extremism'.
In 1992, Old Etonian William Shawcross wrote an "admiring" biography of Rupert Murdoch, & in 2011 was appointed a member of the board of directors of the grotesque trans-Atlantic UK-based neoliberal/free-market 'think tank', the Henry Jackson Society.
Every word has a variety of senses & connotations, which shift over time. The word '#woke' is a good current example.
The Right are attempting to make the word 'woke' a pejorative, while others embrace the term, in the sense of its original meaning: 'awake to social injustice'.
Language is a communicative activity, highly dependent on context, whether that of the ongoing discourse or of social & ideological changes. Work on semantic change has focused, not on results of change, but on enabling factors for change.
Attention has been paid to the contributions of cognitive processes, such as analogical thinking, production of cues as to how a message is to be interpreted, and perception or interpretation of meaning, especially in grammaticalization.
While inflation & changes in the power of unions have played a part, a steady increase in personal debt is strongly associated with a steep decline in strikes, strike participation, & days lost to strikes in the vast majority of OECD economies.
The current wave of strikes is the largest in more than a decade, but it's nowhere near the heights reached in the UK during the 1970s. September 1979 saw more than 11 million working days lost due to strike action. The latest figures for November 2022 show 467,000 days lost.
A rapid increase in personal debt has been a major factor suppressing industrial action over the last four decades. The decline of social housing & deregulation of the financial system in most OECD countries has encouraged workers to borrow heavily. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
I find this fascinating - the decline in the share of total net personal wealth held by the UK's top 10% & 1% since the turn of last century, was halted & then reversed under Margaret Thatcher.
In 2023, the UK's richest 1% are now wealthier than 70% of the population combined.
Source: 'The UK’s wealth distribution and characteristics of high-wealth households' (2021) (page 34).warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econom…