English

While the media are reporting the news of the deadlocked EU Summit negotiations over the so-called ‘Recovery Fund’, an eerie silence prevails regarding the Elephant in the Room: The huge wave of austerity the Eurozone is sleepwalking towards. Let’s look at the facts.

What did you think when the Euro-group elected its new leader last week? At least this was not the outcome Frau Merkel had wished?

In less than a year, MeRA25’s our parliamentary group has proven “your voice in parliament”

“Strengthening the solidarity of Europe’s oligarchs is not a good strategy for empowering Europe’s majority. Quite the contrary. Any “recovery” based on such a formula will short-change almost all Europeans and push the majority into deeper despair.”

The pandemic is not the first crisis (if we can say so) that hit capitalism all over the world. what is the difference between this one and the previous crisis? 

Europe never was the battlefield on which the frugal North clashed with the profligate South. Instead, every European country has been the battlefield where a vicious class war is fought by a transnational oligarchy-without-frontiers training its armour against the weaker residents of every country, every region, every community. Covid-19, and the European Union’s response to it, only magnifies the human costs of this unremitting class war.

I spent Monday night, 15th of June, chatting with Anish Kapoor for an hour. I began by asking him about life in 1950s India as the child of a Punjabi Hindu Admiral and a Bagdadi Jewish mother. Our conversation moved on to a Kibbutz in Israel before landing in Blighty and in particular Hornsby Art School, where he encountered a kind of freedom that art schools lack today. It shifted to form and poetry, to his various phases as a sculptor and multi-faceted artist.

Julian called me a little earlier on, at 14.22 London time to be precise. From Belmarsh High Security Prison of course. This is not the first time but, as you can imagine, every time I hear his voice I feel honoured and moved that he should dial my number when he has such few and far between opportunities to place calls.