Talking about democracy – an interview from the frontline

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It’s easy to rail about the failures of our governance systems – the unfairness of elections, the unaccountable behaviour of our governments or the grotesque abuse of democracy unfolding with Greece’s fiscal evisceration by fellow eurozone governments, the European Commission and the IMF. These sorts of failures increasingly bumped up against my conventional understanding of […]

Fraudcast News reading and Q+A, London, Aug 1

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Friday August 1, 2014 St Mary’s Community Centre, Upper Street, Islington N1 2TX. 6.30pm to 9.00pm When Patrick Chalmers hit on becoming a foreign news correspondent, he dreamed of somehow helping advance the cause of social justice around the world. When he eventually landed that dream job, he soon realised it had little to do […]

Farage: good in parts, awful in others

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Good comment piece in today’s Guardian newspaper. Couldn’t help wading into the comments section as per the following: A more positive interpretation would be that the ineffectual attempts to destroy Ukip show the growing fragility of the carefully crafted management of what is sometimes called “the national conversation”. It suggests that in the future, there […]

United Kingdom – but for how long?

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This is an article I wrote for this week’s edition of the Fox Report in The Friend Magazine. The Friend is the most widely read Quaker magazine in Britain. Its Fox Reports, of which the Democracy unmasked series is the latest, is the magazine’s investigative arm, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Patrick Chalmers […]

Crisis? What crisis? Yeah, right.

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Franco-Greek film director and philospher Yannis Youlantas meets his audience Yannis Youlountas talks about ‎Greece‬, the meaning of ‪‎crisis‬, ‪‎fascism‬ and people’s coping responses after a recent screening of “Ne vivons plus comme des esclaves” (Rough translation: ‘Let’s no longer live like slaves’). The rights-free documentary is due for internet release on September 25th via […]

Ethics in journalism? Nice idea

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I wrote the following email post for the Baron website in response to an article about the Hacked Off co-founder and ex-Reuters reporter Brian Cathcart. It speaks for itself: Brian’s doing a great job at Hacked Off [■ The Reuter Society – Brian Cathcart: My debt to Reuters]. I went to one of its events […]

Snowden’s act of sacrifice echoes self immolators

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Edward Snowden is a remarkable man. His decision to release a cache of top-secret intelligence documents was cooly considered for years. It will totally change his life and could even have him killed. He knows that, having worked for the CIA and for outside contractors to the US National Security Agency. In a note accompanying […]