Iran has struck Israel.
previous preamble
The continuing fall of the remains of the British Empire is pretty entertaining from the outside: an archaic royal family that is seemingly being smote with disease by God itself for their past crimes; a navy that virtually no longer functions, ramming into foreign ports and under constant repair; and an economy that cannot seem to stop sputtering, fucked whether they're in the EU or outside it. Watching the impacts on people from the inside is a little more worrying, though.
A fifth of the population is in poverty, including nearly a third of all children. These figures have barely shifted since the Labour government in the early 2000s, aside from a decreasing poverty rate for pensioners. Actually, poverty hasn't substantially shifted since Margaret Thatcher. Before her, the poverty rate was around 14%, but her catastrophic policies caused a major increase, and poverty levels since then are still 50% higher than over 50 years ago, because neoliberal economic policy since then has not fundamentally changed. Parties and corporations have impoverished the usual vulnerable groups, such as large families, minority ethnic groups (including half of Pakistani and Bangladeshi households!) and disabled people. These differences are also regional, with the North more impoverished than the richer Southeast (but some of the poorest boroughs are in London, so it's a complex pattern).
With Corbyn's defeat in 2019 mere months before the pandemic began, the Labour Party shifted back towards the right, with left-wingers purged from the party if they did not kowtow to Keir Starmer. This leaves us with a situation where the only substantial difference between the two parties would be on social policy, but it goes without saying that economic policy is the overwhelming factor that determines if minorities can have a decent life. Worker-oriented movements since then have been largely not under the umbrella of major party leaderships, such as the Don't Pay movement in late 2022 that arose in the wake of dramatically rising energy prices where 3 million people vowed to not pay them (which did lead to results).
Most notably recently is the major upset in the constituency of Rochdale - the victory of George Galloway - who is the leader of the Workers Party of Britain, which describes itself as both socialist and socially conservative. This took place both in the context of aforementioned economic troubles, as well as anger over Israel's genocide of Gaza in the British population, especially in British Muslims. It remains to be seen how much of this is an isolated event, especially as Corbyn has, understandably, refused to collaborate with Galloway due to his socially conservative stances. The UK general election will be held at some point within the next 9 months or so, and might well be a shitshow depending on what happens domestically and geopolitically before then; parallels to the current American electoral shitshow with increasing anger over Biden are pretty apparent. The Conservatives are quite likely to lose given 14 years of uninspired rule if current polling is correct, but it truly is a race to the bottom.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is the United Kingdom! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Given that this is my home country, I figure I'll give an answer to the questions that I posit to others.
The UK political elite range from protectionists to globalists. The Brexit vote was at least partially founded on the idea of turning inwards, bringing power to domestic industries and not allowing as much European influence. It's obviously more complicated than that, because the UK was not about to become autarkic - instead, the proposed plan was to abandon EU deals that were perceived as limiting and engage more with the rest of the world, so in reality, it was almost contradictorily protectionist and globalist. It goes without saying that this "plan" was more-or-less smoke and mirrors for all but a few true believers, merely intended for profit and, of course, to ride on racist sentiments. In practice, at the end of the day, the UK elite are pretty firmly globalists. They were among the original practitioners of neoliberalism and have similarly exported industries abroad, with Thatcher's reign being especially intense in terms of deindustrialization but the trend has not been appreciably slowed except when there was not much else to export. Nowadays, the UK economy is based generally on high-end industrial products and finance capital, insurance, etc etc. Socialists do exist and actually have made more grounds than in America, a country which the UK is very reasonably compared to, with Corbyn's control of the Labour party in the late 2010s being the best recent example, but socialism here tends to be tainted with social conservatism, as Galloway is a good example of.
Britain deals with several legacies. The most unique of which is that they were once the center of the world's largest empire before the United States. When things fell apart in the 20th century, their power waned, but the artifacts and memory of this legacy still remain in the population, especially in older people who were educated about the UK as a world-bestriding colossus, or were taught by people who grew up in that era and with that propaganda. There is a general feeling in the political sphere - often unarticulated but detectable with the right lens - that the UK, or even the world, is a worse place now that their very visible and formal imperialism has collapsed, and people pine for the "good old days" even if they don't explicitly state it; this is comparable to older people in the US who are nostalgic for a simpler and more united time such as the, uh, 1950s and 1960s before black people obtained de jure rights.
Another legacy is that of their conflict with Ireland over the centuries, and particularly the most recent conflict called The Troubles, which Thatcher tragically survived. However, I personally haven't seen anybody think that trying to reclaim or fight Ireland is a good idea right now and seem pretty content to just let things be. Things are a little more complicated when talking about Northern Ireland, and people probably don't want to hand that over to Ireland, but that's outside of my current knowledge so I'm not gonna talk much further on it. Scottish independence is another domestic political issue which has been much less violent, though there are many in Scotland who are passionate about it. Scotland has its own party called the SNP which usually achieves large numbers of votes, but there's also always been support for Labour and the Conservatives too.
There is, finally, the Brexit vote, which I've already pointed out, where the UK sought to leave the EU due to a perceived sense of getting a bad deal (for what it's worth, the UK has always had benefits from the EU not afforded to other nations inside it; it's been allowed to keep its currency and not adopt the euro, for example, which Greece would be jealous of). It's been an issue that dominated British political discourse since at least 2016 after the vote for it narrowly succeeded, and doesn't neatly fall upon the Conservative-Labour divide. In fact, it seems almost perpendicular to it, with pro and anti-Brexit Labour and Conservative voters, with everybody each having their own collection of reasons why they think it's a good or bad idea. Nowadays, with the UK outside of the EU, the issue has predictably died down, with plenty of people supporting either side still but with a general sense of being disappointed by the results ("They went too hard!" or "They didn't go hard enough!" etc).
The UK is relatively stable. There are large protests especially recently due to Israel's genocide in Gaza, but there is no sense of a fracturing political scene in the sense of "Oh shit, the government might possibly collapse!" There have been a couple points where the government has seemed a little shakier than usual - the first being in 2019 when there were rumblings that if Corbyn were to win, that the military (and probably the Central Bank and other such institutions) would rebel against his rule, but he failed to win for other reasons. The second was when Liz Truss was briefly made Prime Minister in late 2022, before resigning very shortly after and being replaced by her unelected main rival Rishi Sunak. With Keir Starmer taking control of the Labour Party, the two main parties have maintained the Western democracy pantomime of pretending to have big disagreements while actually agreeing on most things and being a one-party state. There are, of course, lots of arguments between politicians - neither party is a monolith - but nothing that threatens stability meaningfully.
The UK has had a LOT of relationships due to the nature of being an empire, although the UK probably cares much less about them than they care about the UK. All of the independence days around the world celebrating them breaking off from the UK are proof of that. That all being said, to keep things brief, I would say that the UK has had a strong relationship with the USA (first adversarial due to the colonial relationship, and then gradually becoming allied in the 19th and 20th centuries); Argentina (the Falklands War); France (centuries-long history of alliances and wars); Israel (selling the territory that would become the occupied state of Palestine to Zionists); China (the Opium Wars); and Australia (similar to the USA, except without a war to separate the two countries; Australia was once a penal colony for the UK).
The UK's political factions are composed of the Conservatives, the Labour Party, and the Liberal Democrats. Regional parties in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland also exist, and there are plenty of tiny parties that gain little support. I'm not very familiar with the history of the Conservatives, but the analogy sometimes made that they're approximately the same as the Democrats are in America isn't too far from the truth. Labour has shifted over time from a more genuinely socialist-oriented party albeit more reformist than revolutionary in the first half of the 20th century, to the "New Left" Labour which took power at the turn of the millennium under Tony Blair which essentially surrendered to the Conservative ideology and merely argued that they could steer the ship more competently. As stated before, there was a brief socialist resurgence under Corbyn, but for a variety of reasons (which are still debated to this day), he failed to create a party that could defeat the Conservatives, and since 2020, the Labour Party has once again fallen into the "New Left", or perhaps now the New New New Left.
The Liberal Democrats are the party that I'm the least familiar with but are really the third party in England, forming coalitions to allow one party or another to gain a majority. I'm not precisely sure what they claim to believe in, but in practice they seem to float around; sometimes being in the center, sometimes being on the center-left, and sometimes being on the center-right. The only "event" that I'm strongly aware of in recent history is when Nick Clegg, who led the party from 2007 to 2015, basically let everybody after forming a coalition with the Conservatives and not getting some big promises out of them. I can't say I've particularly cared about them since then.
I've already mentioned the Northern Ireland parties that have sought independence and also the Scottish National Party, but for the latter, their independence referendum was voted down 45-55 in 2014, which has dampened enthusiasm for the project. There was rumblings during the Brexit days that Scotland might try and declare independence to re-join the EU but those only remained rumblings. The SNP experienced a fall from grace due to a controversary that I only half-remember which prompted the leader, Nicola Sturgeon, to resign in 2023, then being replaced by Humza Yousaf. Once again, they're the majority party but not the only party in Scotland; certainly not in the Scottish Parliament.
The UK is about as equal as most Western democracies are, in both the better and worse ways. Racism and sexism very obviously still exist, there are areas in various cities where poverty is rampant and structural racism places people in colour in those environments, and so on, but pride marches are a thing and few politicians are outwardly saying that women deserve less rights or anything, just in the more covert ways. An overwhelming majority of people support the right to an abortion. The main issue that dominates recent discussion is about trans rights; most here will be familiar with the designation of the UK as "TERF Island", which is about right. The right for trans people to exist is hotly debated, as if this isn't an inherently dehumanizing discussion. The other major social issue that conservatives love to discuss is immigration, with the mere existence of a lifeboat containing a dozen or two brown-skinned people arriving on the shores of a country containing nearly 70 million treated as a DEFCON 1 event signalling the end of British civilization as we know it. Despite immigration numbers being pretty low compared to the current population; despite the UK's long history of taking over foreign nations and thus prompting migrating between those places; and despite the UK playing a proud role in destabilizing and bombing their way through countries whose citizens flee and try and find refuge in the UK; the discussion about immigration is only limited to the typical rhetoric about how every person of color is a benefits-hoarding dragon keeping 36 jobs in their attic and keeping them from "real" (read: white) British citizens, and how they're not allowed to oppress our gays - only WE'RE allowed to do that!
Going to reverse the last two bulletpoints:
Britain once had indigneous people who inhabited the island, though I'm very unfamiliar with the pre-Roman history; needless to say that the Romans came along in AD 43 and had taken the place over in about a generation. Like in most places the Romans went, much of their institutions and even structures had a large impact of our history - so large that it's often difficult to determine what doesn't somehow originate from the Roman Empire. Once Rome collapsed, as far as I'm aware, the UK had a similar history as the rest of the continent - keeping some of the Roman institutions, watching them decay, repairing what could be repaired and otherwise surviving, with the cultural group which existed during this time being called the Anglo Saxons. The UK became an arena in 1066 in the Norman Conquest, resulting in the Viking force being defeated and the Normans taking control. These were then replaced by the Plantagenets, to whom Richard the Lionheart of Crusades fame belonged. Then came the Tudors, the Stuarts, and finally Oliver Cromwell in the mid 17th century, who started a civil war and won, creating the Commonwealth, but his failson fucked up and the royalty came back de jure (really it still existed de facto). Then came the monarchs that people, including myself, actually give a modicum of a shit about, including George III who presided over the defeat to America and Victoria I, who had a whole period named after her.
During this period, the British Empire rose, presiding in four main arenas: North America, Africa, India and surrounding areas, and the Pacific - though not necessarily concurrently. Britain and other European nations had a lot of interest in the Caribbean due to the potential profit of cash crops, transporting and enslaving tens of millions of African and Caribbean-indigneous slaves in the worst atrocities on the planet up to that point in history. Britain and France also bickered over America and Canada, while Britain and the Netherlands bickered over India, creating their respective East India Companies. Eventually, a British focus on naval prowess and a relatively more modern economy, as well as the advantages of industrialization and early capitalism, led to them taking a commanding lead over their European counterparts overseas, with Britain generally coming out on top in wars. There was never a substantial period of consistent supremacy - Britain was deeply afraid of a European invasion and thus made even more ships than necessary in order to handle both a sprawling foreign empire and their foes right next to them. India became their economic "jewel" in the 19th century as America achieved and maintained independence and slavery was abolished, while directly causing mass famines both in India and around the world which killed tens of millions more people, and then they ventured further into Africa and killed yet more fucking people. This obviously culminated in World War 1 as European nations had less territory to exploit and had to fight each other more directly than ever before for supremacy, and again in World War 2.
By this time, the British Empire was very clearly declining as America's neoimperialist star rose. In the decades that followed, nations declared independence and despite some very brutal fights in some cases, the trend was generally that Britain would, as it imagined, very magnanimously let these new infant nations which they had "raised" or "uplifted" have independence; things would go well for a short period of time; and then inevitably collapse into infighting as the legacies of colonialism and the still very much still existing neocolonialism and capitalist exploitation kept them in poverty and subservience to Britain and the United States, thus fueling narratives that Britain was "the only empire that fell without very much bloodshed," and also racist ideas, upon watching these nations fall into infighting, that this was somehow their true nature coming out as soon as the paternalistic figure stepped away.
As stated, nations withdrew from the British Empire, with Britain left with the spoils of centuries of obscene quantities of exploitation, leaving them in a good position. These riches were never remotely evenly distributed, but the complex web of social and economic factors from the empire, as well as propaganda, created a country which was considerably less radical than various other nations at the time of WW1. This is not to say that socialist and even communist groups did not gain prominence in the inter-war period, because some did. However, for a variety of reasons (such as the goddamn Sankey Committee and the missed opportunities there) the environment never turned as revolutionary as it did in Russia or Italy, and the optimistic post-war period crashed into an purposefully-caused economic recession due to the fucking neoclassical economists which then curtailed hope of creating a better country until World War 2, more or less. After this, the contradictions were difficult to contain much longer and institutions like the National Health Service were created to reform the country rather than risk revolution as the Soviets pressured Europe into improving worker conditions or tempt revolution. Thatcher came along and dramatically reformed the country in the other direction, crushing the miners' strikes and truly inaugurating the period of exporting everything that isn't nailed down to places with less labour rights, which is the same period we are in a good 50 years on.