Social Justice

Brexit has been a shock. It wasn’t the European Union that smashed the trade unions, depleted Britain’s social housing stock and then went on an orgy of privatisation, but Brexit has handed complete, unregulated control over to those who did, and the potential consequences reach far beyond Britain’s borders.

Everyone agrees that we are in the midst of a massive financial and economic crisis – but how can it be resolved? A new publication from Green House think tank, ‘The Post Growth Project’, sets out to critically examine why growth is regarded as so central to our economic system, and to challenge the assumption that it is ‘bad news’ when the economy doesn’t grow.

The European Trade Union Institute recent conference on ‘The Socio-Ecological Transition: A New Climate for the EU’s Sustainability Transition’ laid bare the need for radical change to deal with the climate crisis. And if battling climate change requires making our societies less superficial, less focused on expansion and instead more focused on equality, then that’s something we can all fight for.

Secretive changes to the London Court of International Arbitration will make the current EU-US Trade Deal even more damaging for democracy. This makes it even more urgent that citizens in the UK and across Europe oppose such a worrying trade deal and the Investor-State Dispute Settlement that goes with it. This trade deal will turn Europe into a real-life game of Monopoly – where the rich can snap up anything they want.

While an excellent book, we need to look further than simply saying ‘social movements are the only answer’ if we are to develop effective movements that create change. The need for social movement mobilisation too easily becomes a slogan rather than a nuanced solution. We can both praise and look deeper than Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’.

Negotiations over the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are being conducted as if they were private business deals. Trade policies, however, affect all of us and have implications for the global economy.

The welfare state is no longer affordable, we are told from all sides – neither in the Netherlands, nor in Europe as a whole. Cuts must be made in the social services, the argument runs, to rescue the economy. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Here is a green vision.

Using examples from her own home, Corfu, Vera Koronaki describes the reasons why we need solidarity, both in Europe as well as beyond, and the steps that we can take to achieve it.

Reflecting on contemporary and historical debates on the concept of ‘solidarity’ in Sweden, Per Gahrton finds conflicting views on what many take to be a simple concept.

Inequality helped set in motion a downward spiral that resulted in the global financial crisis. Today, that inequality has finally been acknowledged as a central problem, and addressing it successfully can help us to not only overcome the crisis but to move to a more sustainable society.