Lost an empire, not found a role
Paul Mason finds in the UK’s foreign and defence review a wilful refusal of its natural European engagement.
politics, economy and employment & labour
Paul Mason is a leading British writer and broadcaster and author of Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future.
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Paul Mason finds in the UK’s foreign and defence review a wilful refusal of its natural European engagement.
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Paul Mason writes that a Biden US presidency allied to an EU pursuing ‘strategic autonomy’ leaves a ‘sovereign’ UK with a bit-part role.
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The most frightening thing is not the UK government’s end-game strategy, Paul Mason writes. It’s that there isn’t one.
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Paul Mason argues that with authoritarian conservatives in the White House and the Kremlin it’s no surprise the far right is thriving in Europe.
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Paul Mason bemoans how ‘Brexit’ has left the UK a beached whale in a world in need of technological regulation driven by European values.
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In a nightmare-scenario ‘Brexit’ denouement, the UK government provokes no-deal chaos from which it hopes to profit after its Covid-19 shambles.
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Paul Mason explains how Boris Johnson’s idiosyncratic initial response to the coronavirus stemmed from his particularistic empire nostalgia.
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Paul Mason explains how, even after the UK has technically left the EU, ‘Brexit’ has escalated into a culture war over immigration.
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Paul Mason turns in his Social Europe column from postcapitalism to the theme of post-Brexit Britain.
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Paul Mason reimagines the Manchester of his birth in a postcapitalist age—and raises the challenge of getting there.
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The solidly bourgeois Financial Times fears Labour could come to power with a potentially postcapitalist programme, Paul Mason writes.
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Paul Mason continues his sketch of a postcapitalist world by drawing out its implications for something in increasingly short supply—time.
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What makes the 21st century city the harbinger of a postcapitalist world is that for the first time in modern history the network can transcend the market.
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Capitalism emerged in the interstices of feudalism and Paul Mason finds a prefiguring of postcapitalism in the lifeworld of the contemporary European city. Raval, Barcelona, March 2019. The streets are full of young people (and not just students)—sitting, sipping drinks, gazing more at laptops than into each other’s eyes, talking quietly about politics, making art, […]
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Paul Mason begins a series of columns for Social Europe on the theme of postcapitalism and society, stressing the urgency of a new economic model. What characterises the present moment in history is a pervasive sense of unrealism among elites. Official discourses are no longer used as guides to action, laws are not applied and […]
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I want to start with some advice from George Orwell. In 1940, during the Dunkirk crisis, as the British elite made one blunder after another, Orwell wrote in his diary that, for about 10 years, left wing intellectuals had been able to predict events better than the Cabinet. Orwell said: it was not about any power to […]
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The White Paper by Jean-Claude Juncker on 1 March 2017 is a poor answer to the crisis of the European Union. In response, I am proposing that parties and movements committed to internationalism and social justice offer the following alternative to the five options Juncker outlines. I am throwing it out as a draft for discussion among […]
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Three Labour figures — Tom Watson, Ed Balls and Tristram Hunt — have, in the past 24 hours, called for a revision to the EU free movement rules. This needs to be translated into an immediate offer aimed at swinging the referendum for Remain. Labour has to explicitly embrace renegotiation of the EU Treaty. Currently the Leave vote is […]
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