Liberate Tate action against BP sponsorship
After Monday night’s mini-spill outside the Tate Britain, enacted by the artist-activist group Liberate Tate, there has been a flow (‘scuse the pun) of press coverage from around the world, opening up the debate around corporate sponsorship of the arts (which is, in my personal opinion, a victory in itself).
Much of the arguments that are critical of the action taken, have followed along these general lines – that we, as activists, should be targeting BP, not the Tate; that we should be targeting all oil companies, not just BP, as other companies such as Shell have a high stake in our cultural institutions too; that oil has been sponsoring the arts for the past 20 years, so why bother protesting about it now; and that the Tate and the arts in general have no choice but to accept corporate sponsorship, especially in the light of further cuts in public spending.
Osborne’s Legacy – A generation on the unemployment scrap-heap
by Chuka Umunna
So now we know: the action being taken by this Lib-Con government in the name of deficit reduction will cost at least 1.1m jobs across the public and private sectors. How do we know this? Because the Treasury says so, hence today’s big story.
But far from the media circus, a new deficit is growing. Not a fiscal deficit, but a generational one. It takes the form of the thousands of young people who will leave school this September with no prospects of work or training and who risk slipping into a crippling cycle of long-term unemployment. It is a debt that the new government is racking up in order to fund a macho, ideologically motivated drive to slash government spending deep and fast. And unlike the fiscal deficit, it will not take four or six or 10 years to pay down; it will take a generation.
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Thailand is no Human Rights Champion
by Pokpong Lawansiri
Thai Buddhist Monks being arrested during the May 2010 crackdown in Bangkok
The recently concluded session of the UN Human Rights Council, an intergovernmental organisation tasked to promote and protect human rights worldwide, ended with the election of Thailand as the new president to the 47-member council.
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