Articles in the The Commentary Category
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Polarisation in America: Neighbours in suburbia with opposed political views.
U.S. journalist, Danielle Maisano, who has been living in London for 11 years, shares her views on the build-up that led to the fallout of Trump winning his second term.
The last time I voted in a U.S. presidential election on U.S. soil was in 2008. It was also the last time I felt truly inspired by a Democratic nominee. I came politically of age during the George W. Bush period. After years of watching war criminals, Bush and his VP, Dick …
Features, The Commentary »

Post truth Trump who is vying to get a second term as president of America in 2025.
“Cat-eating Haitians” – the most recent buzzworthy but baseless claim amplified by the Trump campaign, sparked hyper-salivation amongst MAGA fans, and disbelief in the rest of us. While researching this latest xenophobic rumour, a Springfield, Ohio police report revealed how easily Trump’s post-truth world can be debunked.
In 2016, the same year Trump successfully campaigned to become the 45th POTUS, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year was “post-truth” and is defined as: “relating to or …
Features, The Commentary »

“Not a pretty picture: A Tory legacy of divide and rule” The Illegal Migration Bill highlights a party that has a history of xenophobic policies.
The UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s controversial Illegal Migration Bill has caused a lot of concern with protests and open letters condemning its harshness, even exposing division within the Tory Party itself. If the Bill is to become a law, in its current state, it contravenes European and international human rights laws. Yet this policy is part of a tradition of xenophobia in Tory party politics …
The Commentary »

The effect of the pandemic must be combatted not just through medicinal but monetary means.
Benjamin Maslow who created his hierarchy of needs stated in his book The farther reaches of human nature that “The need for ‘dignity, for example, can be seen as a fundamental human right in the same sense that it is a human right to have enough calcium or enough vitamins to be healthy.”
These words written in 1971 have a very poignant meaning in today’s society during a pandemic which has exposed not just a broken …
The Commentary »

One year ago today, I received a work email saying that someone had tested positive for COVID, and that they would be decontaminating the whole building that weekend, but no need to worry, we should be able to return to work next week.
Now, up until this point in 2020, I had been so overwhelmed with work projects, the virus was just a distant murmur – nothing really to concern myself with. But as soon as it had penetrated my immediate circle, my brain switched on. How ashamedly reactive of me.
I …
The Commentary »

The room that I currently write this in will probably no longer be here in a few weeks. The building is going to be torn down. I am a property guardian in a school in central Hackney. What was meant to be six months of accommodation turned out to last just over a year.
I was lucky on that point and on the location, Hackney my eternal home, and also the fact that I live with eight other individuals who are great.
They, like myself, will be out of a home but …
The Commentary »

Putting personal political perspectives aside, I hate to say that I was right in my prediction that Ed Milliband would not win the last election. But his influence certainly left his mark on the party with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters, yet I still feel that it is not enough to resurrect Old Labour policies. The electoral map of 2015, pictured to the left, proves the point that we do live with rose-tinted glasses in our leftist island of London engulfed by a sea of blue.
Jeremy Corbyn is a …
The Commentary »

It was while reading the salmon coloured pages of the Financial Times that I came across an excellent piece by Tony Barber in the Global Insight section entitled:“Baltic states fear Kremlin concern for their ethnic Russians”.
This FT piece sparked a memory of a point that I had raised to a Goldsmith’s lecturer, when I attended a guest class in leadership this year. I spoke about the fact that Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Crimea 2014 were the age old dictatorial excuse of defending ones own indigenous population in other corners of the …
The Commentary »

Brett Bailey’s planned Barbican installation, Exhibit B has come under fire from criticisms that it is racist as it shows black models in poses as slaves.
Yet to see is one thing and to understand is quite another. Bailey has been known for his other work that confronts racism and colonialism.
I personally support the exhibition, just because we live in an age of PC does not mean that prejudices in all their forms do not exist. PC has become a blanket, a way to cover up the evils of the past …
The Commentary »

It all started with a brown trench coat, a tuft of ginger hair and a white dog. Yep it was while growing up reading Tintin annuals that I became enthralled with the concept of reporting and the world of journalism. Here was a character who did not just travel the world but he righted wrongs, fought against injustice and had some bloody interesting friends.
As I got older I started to get more involved with researching society and politics and to analyse the world that we live in and why it works …
The Commentary »

Journalist James Foley’s death highlights a bigger problem for freelancers out there desperate to put themselves in harms way to make a living for what they love!
Read the Guardian piece by Martin Chulov, it illustrates the lack of care and of training by news organisations as they quite happily take the stories of those on the frontline and pay them peanuts in return.
Who is the real cannon fodder in these conflicts? Many of us just sit back and gobble up information easily provided to us and never realise what someone went through for …