Public Reading Rooms — The Politics of Art and Vice Versa

Politics
17 October 2018
Saudi atrocities in Yemen using UK arms are worse story than disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi

Politics

Why Britain’s royal family is a festering anti-democratic dynasticism at the heart of our political system

Why Britain’s royal family is a festering anti-democratic dynasticism at the heart of our political system

We’ve been conned into fighting climate change as individuals when it’s corporate power destroying the planet

We’ve been conned into fighting climate change as individuals when it’s corporate power destroying the planet

Vampire State: How much longer can the decaying, bankrupt, cancerous Tory government survive?

Vampire State: How much longer can the decaying, bankrupt, cancerous Tory government survive?

Pamphlet: Far Right on the Rise: What it is and how to fight it

Brexit Boris Johnson - From Mayor to Nightmare

Transform #4: Remembering 1968 - La Beauté Est Dans La Rue

Creeping Fascism: Brexit, Trump, and the Rise of the Far Right

Jeremy Corbyn

Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn

By Kenneth Surin

Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Benn: character assassination goes with returning Labour to its socialist roots

By Jeff Goulding

Why Liverpool FC fans on the Kop unfurled a banner in honour of Jeremy Corbyn

22 September 2018
Jeremy Corbyn now: why there can be no return to politics as usual
18 September 2018
Corbyn and the antisemitism “crisis” that never was, aimed at disappearing the Palestinian people
7 September 2018
Why the Israel lobby’s non-stop attacks on Jeremy Corbyn will backfire
3 September 2018
How Labour’s “anti-Semitism crisis” was fabricated out of thin air
3 September 2018
Mass media is the enemy of the people like the cage is the enemy of the bird
2 September 2018
Apologies and appeasement will not stop the witch hunt against Jeremy Corbyn

Politics

Media in chains

By John Wight

How far has the British media been penetrated by the country’s intelligence services?

Shadow world of global arms trade

By Andrew Feinstein

The shadow world of the global arms trade: lifting the veil on corruption at its core

13 October 2018
Ten lies we’re told to justify the slaughter of 20 million in the First World War
12 October 2018
God save us from the Queen and the fetishized DNA of her royal family
11 October 2018
The Tommy Robinson photos show how far right the British army is, says ex-soldier
11 October 2018
Question for private scavengers feeding off the NHS: what did you eat for lunch today?

Media

Mark Rylance and Harold Pinter

By Robin Beste

Art, Truth and Politics: Harold Pinter’s legendary Nobel lecture performed by Mark Rylance

Julian Assange and John Pilger

By John Pilger

Hold the front page for the Propaganda Blitz – how the corporate media distort reality

25 September 2018
How BBC series Bodyguard misrepresents Muslims and feeds Islamophobic hatred
21 August 2018
When is a government not a government? When it’s a “regime” and ripe for “change” by the US
15 August 2018
How much lower will Jeremy Corbyn’s enemies sink in the race to the gutter of British politics?
13 August 2018
What if in interests of humanity we took control of the media away from a few sociopathic oligarchs?

Rise of the Far Right

Rock Against Racism

By Patrick Sawer

How Rock Against Racism created a climate in which being racist was not acceptable

Tom Waits

By Public Reading Rooms

Tom Waits releases anti-fascist record: Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful)

10 September 2018
What can we learn today from Britain’s first anti-fascist street battle?
5 September 2018
Israel, creeping fascism, and the ferocious attack on the Labour Party
8 August 2018
Rise of the far right: we must learn from history, or be doomed to repeat it
29 July 2018
Austerity produced Brexit and Brexit has unleashed a carnival of reaction
14 June 2018
The far right threat is real and we can’t be complacent
14 June 2018
The resistible rise of far right icon Tommy Robinson

Harry Leslie Smith

Warmongering politicians on red poppy day

By Public Reading Rooms

Why I will never again wear a red poppy on Remembrance Sunday by veteran Harry Leslie Smith

27 July 2018
Life before the NHS: hunger, filth, fear, death
3 July 2018
If we let them, the Tories will destroy the NHS and return us to dog-eat-dog world of my youth
21 June 2018
I’m nearly 100 years old, I saw the 1945 refugee crisis firsthand – listen to my warning

Michael Rosen

Netanyahu Nation-State selfie

By Michael Rosen

Why the Nation State of Israel does not mention the people who are not mentioned

Michael Rosen

By Michael Rosen

Michael Rosen: When fascism arrives as your friend…

11 June 2018
To control all of us, blame ‘the other’ – foreigners, immigrants, refugees
10 December 2017
Bah! Humbug! Michael Rosen rewrites A Christmas Carol for modern age of austerity
8 July 2017
“Concerns about immigration”? Where does that come from?
9 April 2017
Would you support Labour if George Clooney was leading it instead of Jeremy Corbyn?

Music and Politics

Roger Waters and Bono

By Aidan O Brien

Roger Waters: champion of the Palestinian cause vs U2 political mediocrity Bono

MIA

By Carrie Giunta

From refugee child to political artist: what makes M.I.A. so controversial?

They dismissed not just her and her message. They went on to label her a terrorist despite having zero grounds for doing this.

23 September 2018
The Young’uns present The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff
16 September 2018
RIP Rachid Taha: “To be called a political artist is no insult, but there’s not many of us left”
12 September 2018
How Victor Jara wrote his last song, Chile Stadium, in the midst of torture and mass slaughter
11 September 2018
Bruce Springsteen’s tribute to Victor Jara, killed by the CIA-directed coup in Chile

Poetry

Burnt shell of Grenfell Tower

By Niall McDevitt

The Tower of Babylon. 24 lines comemmorating the 24 storeys of Grenfell. By Niall McDevitt

By Heathcote Williams

Celebrating Jeremy Corbyn’s favourite poet Shelley – a poet for the many not the few

21 July 2018
Fake News and Trump the orange Fuhrer making America great again
13 July 2018
If you want to see how the poor die, come see Grenfell Tower. By Ben Okri
12 July 2018
In praise of conscientious objection: For Harold Pinter on what would have been his 88th birthday
12 July 2018
Kate Tempest’s brilliant takedown of Theresa May at Glastonbury Festival 2017
9 July 2018
MARDUK (neoliberal sonnet). By Niall McDevitt
7 July 2018
Langston Hughes: I look at the world

Islamophobia

Three women wearing niqab

By Susan Ram

How what some Muslim women wear has become the cutting edge of racist ideology

By Lindsey German

How Boris Johnson opens the door to the far-right and a rag bag of racists

Brexit

Brexit

By John Wight

Brexit crisis engulfing UK politics only goes to show you can’t make soup out of an idea

30 July 2018
The fools, frauds, fakes and incompetents leading Britain into Brexit suicide
30 July 2018
Trump, Brexit and Tory Mayhem: is this a crucial turning point in British politics?
30 June 2018
Billy Bragg on Brexit, Trump, migration, and why we build walls

Palestine

Giant mural of Ahed Tamimi

By Ahed Tamimi

Ahed Tamimi: what it means for child of Israeli occupation to be a symbol of Palestinian resistance

30 September 2018
Gaza’s economy collapses, and any hope of peace, but that was always Israel’s intention
20 September 2018
Israel: brainwashed, full of hatred and fear, drunk on power and self-righteousness
16 September 2018
Is Israel a racist apartheid state or the realisation of Jewish self-determination?

Heathcote Williams

By Heathcote Williams

The reality behind bumbling, blustering ‘national treasure’ Boris Johnson

By Heathcote Williams

What they don’t tell us about Winston Churchill: Great Britain’s Greatest Beast

4 July 2018
Donald J. Trump: president of the US plutocratic pornocracy
1 July 2018
Bees – no human revolution has ever produced anything as good
1 July 2018
The citizen’s arrest of war criminal Tony Blair. By Heathcote Williams
21 June 2018
God save the Queen and her family as they lubricate Britain’s wars
20 June 2018
Boris Johnson: the man with no moral compass who was UK foreign minister
10 June 2018
Dick Lander by Charles Causley. Read by Heathcote Williams

Steve Ashley

Music and Politics

By Steve Ashley

Another Day (for Jeremy Corbyn)

Jeremy Corbyn

By Steve Ashley

Jeremy Corbyn and Trident nuclear ships of shame

Music and Politics

By Steve Ashley

That’s Why (We Don’t Comply With Your War Cry)

Politics of Fashion

By Tansy Hoskins

Stamping out human rights and environmental abuses in the fashion business

By Tansy Hoskins

Are celebrity culture and fashion the new opium of the people?

5 January 2017
How the fashion industry is a stitch up that swindles us all
22 October 2016
Is more ‘ethical’ shopping the way to tame corporate greed and the inequalities of capitalism?
9 September 2016
What’s it good for? Almost nothing. The trouble with second-hand clothes
4 September 2016
Why “fashion” is just an excuse for the rich to exploit the poor