free market | Pandaemonium

“NO ONE HAS BEEN HELD ACCOUNTABLE”

April 13, 2023 by Kenan Malik

It opens with birdsong in the dark. It ends with brightly lit blank screen. In between, we look out from a helicopter, flying across London before arriving at the destination we know we have come to see, yet dread seeing, the burnt corpse of Grenfell Tower, around which the camera circles, again and again. Steve McQueen’s new short film Grenfell is more memorial than documentary. There are no people in it and no words. Its heart is the building, blackened, blistered, mute […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: capitalism, elite, free market, grenfell fire, justice, peter apps, poor, steve mcqueen

ON POLITICS AND HUMAN FLOURISHING

October 27, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the Beveridge Report and the idea of human flourishing, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 October 2022, under the headline “If this chaos does not make us rethink our idea of the good society, whatever will?” “Out of intermittent labour spring our gravest woes. It produces in the labourer intermittent energy; the off-days become habitual; with indolence comes intemperance; with uncertainty of employment comes recklessness about the future; from these result pauperism and the […]

Categories: Britain, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics • Tags: beveridge report, communitarianism, community, free market, human flourishing, libertarianism, poor laws, society, undeserving poor, welfare state, william beveridge

GRENFELL, CORRUPTION AND THE HOLLOWED-OUT STATE

May 4, 2021 by Kenan Malik

. This essay, on the corruption revealed by the Grenfell Inquiry, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 2 May 2021, under the headline “Grenfell is still giving up its secrets and they retain the power to shock”. It is not just the broken promise, it is also the pitilessness of it. In February, Boris Johnson told parliament, in the wake of the cladding scandal, that “no leaseholder should have to pay for the unaffordable costs of fixing defects […]

Categories: Britain, Justice & Liberties, Politics • Tags: arconic, boris johnson, building research establishment, celotex, cladding scandal, corruption, cronyism, fire safety act, flammable cladding, free market, grenfell tower, hollowed-out state, kingspan, privatisation, regulation, sleaze, state regulation, the state

THE OPIOID CRISIS AND THE EXPLOITATION OF PAIN

September 2, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the opioid crisis in America, its roots and its lessons, was published in the Observer on 1 September 2019 under the headline ‘America’s opioid catastrophe has lessons for us all, about greed and racial division’. (I have restored a couple of paragraphs that I had to remove for reasons of space in the Observer.) ‘We’ll build a wall to keep the damn drugs out.’ So insisted Donald Trump at a rally last year to launch the White […]

Categories: International, Science & Technology • Tags: big phrama, david herzberg, donald trump, free market, johnson & johnson, medicine, opioid crisis, pharmaceutical companies, purdue phrama, racism, usa, war on drugs, working class