London
April 1, 2021
The UK is “a model for other white-majority countries.” That’s according to the UK’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which published its delayed report on March 31, concluding additionally to immediate anger and derision that the UK experiences no institutional racism. The commission found anecdotal evidence of racist acts, its chair Tony Sewell told the BBC. “However, evidence of actual institutional racism? No, that wasn’t there, we didn’t find that.”
That isn’t entirely surprising, Stokely Carmichael, the American civil rights organizer, would have responded.
The term “institutional racism” was Carmichael’s coinage. It appeared first in “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America,” a book Carmichael wrote with Charles Hamilton in 1967. A reader runs into the phrase right away, in the second paragraph of the very first chapter. The writers distinguish individual acts of racism which can “be recorded by televi
March 17, 2021
Name a region that most people probably can’t identify on a map, but that European leaders think is the center of gravity of the world.
I’ll wait.
The Indo-Pacific, you said? Shame on you for cheating.
The Indo-Pacific is a new geographic construction that means something different depending on who you’re talking to. Broadly speaking, according to the British think tank Policy Exchange (pdf, p. 15), it “stretches from the Indian sub-continent, up through southeast Asia to China and the northeast Asian countries of Japan and the Koreas,” and borders the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
You’ll have noticed that doesn’t encompass the UK or the EU and yet both are formulating policies that will see them ‘pivot’ towards the region in the coming years, as they adjust their relationships with China and seek new opportunities for trade with the world’s richest emerging markets.
March 12, 2021
A month ago, Caroline Wilson was still popular in China. The UK ambassador’s savvy use of Chinese social media, and her fluent Mandarin, won her more than 13,000 followers on Weibo. But this month, what was an asset became a liability when the Chinese Foreign Ministry reprimanded her over a WeChat post in which she defended critical press coverage of China.
The incident highlights a digital divide. Chinese diplomats have free rein most of the time on Twitter to criticize local governments, as Wilson herself pointed out. But Western diplomats don’t enjoy the same freedom on the Chinese internet.
The WHO and many health experts say that there's no evidence linking AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine with blood clots. But some EU countries have paused their rollout of the jab anyway.
March 8, 2021
When the UK officially left the European Union on Jan. 31, 2020 it put a lot of people out of a job including Nigel Farage, the bombastic former leader of the Brexit Party.
It was an open question what Farage would do next; in a 2021 New Year’s video message that has since been watched more than 1.3 million times, he gave a surprising answer.
“I’ll tell you what the next big challenge is,” he said, “and in some ways, it’s an even bigger challenge than the European Union was a bigger threat to our independence, our way of life, our liberty. And it is China.”