Bank Job directors Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn The mission: buy and write off £1m of household debt. The plan: follow in the footsteps of debt cancellation pioneers and galvanise the local community by harnessing the power of art, place and activism. This is...
Red Pepper
Beyond Leek-Flavoured UKism
Undod banner at Indy rally in Caernarfon 2019 (credit: Robat Idris) Undod (Welsh for ‘Unity’) is a group of people from all over Wales campaigning for a radical form of independence. We believe that an independent Wales will not be worth having if it is merely a...
Statues, street names, and contested memory
On 16 January 2021, Robert Jenrick, MP – Boris Johnson’s Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government – published a now-infamous opinion piece in The Telegraph, denouncing a recent decision by Birmingham City Council to give aspirational names –...
Who decides what counts as ‘political’?
I work in Parliament where, like other public sector workers, I am bound by a contract of “political impartiality”. This applies not only to our work, but we’re also prohibited from participating in certain civic activities like signing petitions, engaging actively in...
Speaking power to truth
Extinction Rebellion protestors in London. Credit: Stefan Müller ‘Knowledge is power,’ says the scheming courtier Littlefinger to Queen Cersei Lannister in an iconic Game of Thrones scene. Unimpressed by a thinly-veiled threat to reveal her secret, Cersei orders her...
How business benefits from Brexit
City of London at night. Credit: Colin The UK has finally left the EU. Out of the single market and the customs union, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) reached on the 23rd December 2020 now forms the basis of the new UK-EU relationship. For many, we have...
Where now on Brexit?
Discussions between Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron. Credit: UK Prime Minister The country seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief when Boris Johnson finally struck his trade deal with the European Union (EU). According to conventional wisdom the signing of...
The conspiracy election
Donald Trump at Basel Fasnacht Carnival (Carnaval.com. CC2.0) Here in the United States, we have been awash in conspiracy theories for quite some time. Even before the rise of Donald Trump, conspiratorial ideation (as the psychologists call it) was the worldview of a...
In the shadow of student rent strikes
Credit: Robert Firth and Block the Block On Manchester’s Oxford Road, in the city’s university district, there is a building that represents the council’s vision of the student housing of tomorrow. From the outside it is tall, grey and rectangular. But inside it has...
End SARS and Fanon’s mission
EndSARS protestors. Credit: TobiJamesCandids ‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it,’ wrote Frantz Fanon. It has been 60 years since Nigeria achieved its independence from Britain, yet these words reverberate...
Review – Asylum for Sale: Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry
At the end of 2019, nearly 80 million people worldwide were forcefully displaced because of war, occupation, extreme poverty and/or the climate crisis. It is hard to comprehend the scale of such displacement. A number equivalent to the combined populations of the UK...
After the Spring
Tahrir Square, July 2011. Credit: Ahmed Abd El-Fatah The ‘coldness’ of what some commentators now dub the ‘Arab Winter’ is felt most chillingly in Egypt, arguably the largest and most globally significant of the revolutionary theatres of a decade ago. No fewer than...











