Derek Wall

book cover, man's face

Derek Wall reviews Hall Greenland’s biography of Michel Pablo, an Egyptian-born Greek revolutionary leader.

London Palestine protest

While British PM Rishi Sunak and Labour opposition leader Keir Starmer are united in supporting Israel’s decimation of Gaza, resistance to the genocidal war is strong and having an impact, reports Derek Wall.

Hugo Blanco

Derek Wall pays tribute to Peruvian revolutionary leader and pioneering ecosocialist Hugo Blanco, who died in London on June 25.

Boris Johnson caricature

Britain’s impressively dishonest and disorganised right-wing Prime Minister Boris Johnson is leaving office, and just about everybody is pleased to see the back of him, writes Derek Wall.

Derek Wall reviews Leigh Bloomfield's new documentary, a fly-on-the-wall, reality TV-style narrative of the April 2019 Extinction Rebellion uprising that shut down much of central London.

Death is touching everyone in Britain with fatalities from COVID-19 running at nearly a thousand a day, writes Derek Wall. So why is Prime Minister Boris Johnson still popular?

 

British politics continues to be chaotic and uncertain. This might appear a surprising judgement, considering that: Boris Johnson’s government has a majority of 80 seats, the first time since the 1980s that the Conservatives have been able to rule without serious parliamentary challenge; and Britain left the European Union on January 31, apparently ending a saga that split first the Conservative Party and then the entire country.

Yet, beneath the surface, politics remains in flux, argues Derek Wall.

The British General Election, held on December 12, resulted in a huge victory for the right and a sweeping defeat for the left. Boris Johnson, a close ally of United States President Donald Trump, topped the poll with 43% of the vote for the Conservative Party.

Britain goes to the polls on December 12, in what could be the most important general election in a generation. Boris Johnson’s increasingly right-wing and chaotic Conservative Party is generally seen as the likely victor, but Labour’s left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn could once again surprise, writes Derek Wall.

The news that a solid gold toilet has been stolen from Winston Churchill's former home of Blenheim Palace seems symptomatic of the present British condition. The British ruling class are not merely having their bathroom fittings taken but they seem assailed by chaos on every side, writes Derek Wall.

Reconstructing Karl Polanyi: Excavation & Critique
By Gareth Dale
Pluto, 2016
246 pp., $33.88

As a well-known British socialist activist and an academic political economist, Gareth Dale is thus ideally placed to write about Karl Polanyi, writes Derek Wall.

Polanyi was a leading 20th century critic of the free market economics that crystallised into the neoliberal system that is now threatening our planet.

Ian Parker has a track record as an ecosocialist political activist in Britain. He is a committed but non-dogmatic Marxist and a psychoanalyst so, unsurprisingly, anything he writes is likely to be serious and challenging.

Despite a strong theoretical and academic background, however, Parker writes in a very engaging and interesting fashion.