In an age of austerity and troubled government spending, one of the great opportunities for cost savings is on military expenditure. Britain has already trimmed its forces budgets and signed some new defense treaties to share resources. Five of our warships are to be decommissioned, and our aircraft carriers will fly US jets or French [...]
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Mapping for rights
If you live in an urban environment, you probably have a house, legal or illegal, on a street with neighbours in a certain part of town. You know where you’re allowed to go and where you’re not within the highly structured urban geography – pavements for people, roads for cars. Particular buildings and places are [...]
Tax evasion: the top ten biggest losers
Globally, $1 in every 6 goes illegally untaxed, squirreled away through clever accounting, tax havens and shadow companies. The Tax Justice Network has calculated the size of the international shadow economy and drawn up a list of countries and what they lose to tax evasion. Here are the top ten biggest losers, with the estimated [...]
Land grabs: the unintended consequences of biofuels
Access to land is one of the oldest sources of conflict. It’s written deep into Britain’s history through the enclosure acts and the seizing of the commons – a process that shaped the landscape, drove people into the cities, and through the industrial revolution, changed the world forever. It’s an injustice that’s never been corrected, [...]
Time for a dictator debt audit
Is it fair that countries still have to pay the debts taken on by dictators, even once the dictator is gone? Surely not, if the borrowed money was wasted, squirreled away into offshore bank accounts or squandered on ego projects or weaponry. But it seems it’s easier to shift the dictators themselves than get rid [...]
Blessed are the peacemakers
Britain’s arms sales to the Middle East are up 27% on last year, according to an investigation by The Times this week. The increased security risk of the ‘Arab spring’, and perhaps David Cameron’s arms sales tour earlier this year, are paying dividends to our various arms companies. Despite government promises to clamp down on [...]
Ten things you didn’t know you owned
This week I’ve been reading All That We Share, an introduction to the idea of the commons by Jay Walljasper. It’s got me thinking about the commons, and I thought I’d post a few things. The commons are the things that are shared between us, owned by nobody but available to all. You might naturally [...]
Remembering what matters
I closed yesterday’s post with a series of questions about what matters, about what kind of a world we are creating and who we are serving. I was interested to read a similar from George Monbiot today. This is from the new introduction to his personal website: While my opinions about particular issues have changed [...]
UK arms sales to the Middle East
In the papers today, another story about Syrian soldiers firing into protesting crowds. 17 people were shot dead last week, 112 over the weekend. It’s entirely possible that they used British ammunition. It’s not the first time our equipment has been used this year to suppress calls for the democracy that we enjoy ourselves. Bahrain: [...]
Time to cut ties with the arms trade
David Cameron is off on a tour of the Middle East this week, touching down in Egypt this afternoon. Arms sales are “expected to be on the agenda” on the tour, and there are rumours that six arms companies are travelling in the trade delegation. I don’t know if they’ve been dropped, but the Prime [...]
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