Confronting the Far Right – Contesting the Reform Party!

In recent local elections on 1 May, the Reform Party of Nigel Farage made huge electoral gains winning hundreds of council seats and overall control of 10 councils. It also won the mayoralty in Greater Lincolnshire as well as an additional MP in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election (BBC, 2 May 2025). In response, the Labour Party government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer published an immigration white paper, toughening conditions on migration. In his ‘island of strangers’ speech (Gov.uk, 12 May 2025), Starmer near-echoed the Rivers of Blood speech by Enoch Powell of 1968 (Guardian, 13 May 2025). The travel of direction is clear. To regain voters, the Labour Party tries to outdo Reform on their anti-migration territory. The country as a whole is shifted to the right as a result.

Nevertheless, how should we confront the rise of the Reform Party from a progressive position?

Facilitating genocide – the UK’s role in the Middle East

In December 2024, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the UK parliament invited contributions to an enquiry about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this guest post, Andreas Wittel publishes his response to that enquiry, highlighting the UK’s deep complicity in the ongoing genocide by Israel of the Palestinian people.

 

The EU Minimum Wage Directive: To Be or Not to Be?

The year began dramatically for Social Europe. On 14 January, Nicholas Emiliou, one of the European Union’s Advocates General, advised the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to annul the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive (AMWD). His opinion supported an action for annulment brought by the Kingdom of Denmark against the European Parliament and the Council, arguing that the AMWD would undermine the rights of national social partners and breach the principle of conferral of powers. In this guest post, Roland Erne discusses these developments.

The Betrayal of Ukraine

When the betrayal came, it was swift and brutal. Donald Trump, having barely started his second presidency, phoned up Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, on Wednesday 12 February and paved the way towards negotiations to end the war without consulting Ukraine itself (BBC, 13 February 2025). When only a week later, high-ranking delegations of both countries including Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met in Riyadh/Saudi Arabia for extensive discussions, no Ukrainian representative was at the table (BBC, 18 February 2025). At the same time, ‘White House officials told Ukraine to stop badmouthing Donald Trump and to sign a deal handing over half of the country’s mineral wealth to the US’ (The Guardian, 20 February 2025). This was presented as a way to pay back all the assistance the US had provided over the course of the war.

The public humiliation of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a meeting in the White House was the final confirmation that the US had dropped its support for Ukraine. Denounced by many European leaders and commentators for what it is, a betrayal, this was not, however, the first betrayal of Ukraine. The country has been betrayed by the West on several occasions before, leaving it now in a perilous situation. In this blog post, I will discuss previous moments of betrayal taking a much longer historical perspective.

The Holocaust, Gaza and lessons from history: Genocide runs deep in German society!

Germany prides itself for the way the country has owned up to past atrocities of the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 and here in particular the Holocaust, in which six million Jews but also Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, and disabled people were murdered. The Holocaust represents ultimate evil, and its teaching became mandatory from the 1970s, 1980s onwards. In this blog post, I will reflect on Germany’s and the Germans’ attempts to atone for the Holocaust in particular in relation to the country’s support for Israel, drawing also on my own experiences in the German school system.

 

What political economy approach for the 21st century?

In my latest open access article Confronting Multiple Global Crises: a political economy approach for the 21^st century, published in the journal Globalizations, I discuss the essential features of a political economy approach, which facilitates the conceptualisation of the internal relations between the current, multiple global crises including a crisis of global capitalism, a crisis of global labour relations, a crisis of global gender relations, a crisis of global race relations and a crisis of global ecology.