The seeds for the crisis in Ukraine were planted 25 years ago when the Clinton Administration decided to expand the North Atlantic Treaty into East Europe, accepting membership from former members of the Warsaw Pact.  In doing so, Clinton turned his back on commitments from President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker in 1990 not to “leap frog” over a reunified Germany in order to expand NATO.  More

A study by the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., shows that none of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative projects have been the author of debt distress; of the 68 BRI projects, only eight are in countries struggling with debt, but this struggle predates Chinese investment. Close studies of Chinese investment in the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota and in the African country of Djibouti show that there is no evidence of asset seizure in either of these cases. More

The Tory government is exaggerating the scale of the refugee situation to curry favour with its xenophobic and racist base. This base has been active in the current Channel crisis. On 20 November, a Royal National Lifeboat Institution volunteer crew was “blocked” from launching out to sea on an emergency call-out by a small crowd which accused the crew of going to the rescue of “illegal” asylum seekers. Bigots of this kind are being egged-on by far-right politicians, like Nigel Farage who described the RNLI as “a taxi service for illegal immigration.” More

Because we live in a world divided into nation-states, because capitalism rules our lives, because the boss tells us what we can and cannot do – we forget that things were different before. We forget that we ever had any sort of freedom. More