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globalisation

Brexit and After

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While many commentators have expressed relief that the financial dust has settled after the decision of UK voters to withdraw from the EU, there is reason to think they relax too soon. Certainly in terms of immediate effects the political shockwaves in the UK are catastrophic and any ‘solution’ for either of the main parties is likely to have a medium (and probably longer) term unraveling effect. On the one hand there is a basic loss of trust within each party, and on the other the implicit perspective that held together general political strategy — a shared sense of positive development, of what is a desirable future — has been punctured. The two orientations reinforce each other.

When the hurly-burly’s done is the battle lost or won?

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Was it a mistake? The voice of the people was heard, certainly. What they were saying isn’t quite so clear, and many comments since from Brexit voters suggest that it was the political caste per se, as much at the EU itself, that was the focus of protest. Whether the vote, which has sent shock waves around the world, and particularly in Europe, will have as its outcome some radical political change—which might be the best possible result—only time will tell. Because, surely, this is in part what the vote meant. This is the 60 per cent of the 40/60 society saying they have had enough.

Bumbling Boris the Confidence Trickster?

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Where EU leaders have got it wrong is that Brexit is less a crisis for Britain (though it is that), than the latest manifestation of a deep-seated European malady. A sense of the risk of the EU unravelling is alive in the air in Germany and France because the fear is that Brexit has launched a dangerous dynamic of EU disintegration that, if uncontrolled, may, like Brexit itself, prove unstoppable. Perhaps this is something of which David Cameron, but also Boris “Opt-Out” Johnson, are painfully aware.

Politics and the Budget Plan

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The snake-oil solutions proffered by Turnbull & Co. in their attempts to renew growth deserve two kinds of comment. First, that our present problems arise out of transformations associated with the shift to globalisation that took off in the 1980s. Second, growth is not really the main point.

Global Avarice, by Alison Caddick

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If the money relation sits at the heart of capitalism, how does its present, twenty-first-century form, digitised and ultra-globalised, break asunder the assumptions and ethics of a given world?

Turnbull’s Response to Terror in Brussels

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In Turnbull’s view, terrorists just appear and organise: all we can do is defend ourselves against them. We need good policy over time on social integration and, apart from this, strong security institutions. This is a war debate, or a debate by a society not wanting to think too much about relations with other cultures or institutional development. It is a debate constructed to win an election rather than seriously take hold of what is happening…

Liberal Tax Dilemma a Sign of the Times

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As Malcolm Turnbull faces the reality of an unpredictable public and an imminent election, he is not finding life all that easy.. Being popular without actual policy had only a short term prospect, and most actual policies that are briefly floated turn out to be fraught one way or another. The most exciting of times are hardly straight-forward.