Matthew Brooker

2 weeks ago | bloomberg.com | Matthew Brooker

Uncollected household waste and rubbish blights the corner of a street as Birmingham council refuse collectors continue their strike. (Bloomberg Opinion) -- It’s the prerogative of older generations to bemoan the fecklessness of youth. One’s struggles to find a place in the world acquire a tinge of heroism and inevitability in the mirror of the receding past. If today’s young people would only learn to forgo the avocado toast and knuckle down like we did, their eventual success would be assured.

3 weeks ago | bloomberg.com | Matthew Brooker

Trash-strewn streets don’t help to sell the image of a renaissance. (Bloomberg Opinion) -- There’s always a silver lining. Economic events invariably create winners as well as losers, and the financial crisis afflicting Britain’s second-largest city is no exception. The only drawback is that the beneficiaries in this case aren’t human. Birmingham’s rat population is flourishing after refuse workers went on strike, leaving 17,000 tons of waste uncollected on the city’s streets.

1 month ago | bloomberg.com | Matthew Brooker

Labour is as fractured and conflicted when it comes to China as the Conservatives were. British Steel Ltd. is once again a ward of the state. Parliament was recalled to sit on a Saturday for the first time since Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, so that members could pass legislation enabling Keir Starmer’s Labour government to take control of the company from China’s Jingye Group.

1 month ago | japantimes.co.jp | Matthew Brooker

Britain can brace itself for another scolding from U.S. Vice President JD Vance. Last week, a second anti-abortion activist was convicted of breaching a protest buffer zone outside a clinic, the same offense that prompted Vance to accuse the U.K. of backsliding on free speech in his February address to the Munich Security Conference. The Veep is right that Britain’s climate for free expression is deteriorating — he just picked the wrong case to illustrate the point.

1 month ago | bloomberg.com | Matthew Brooker

Pay attention or prepare to be next. Graffiti warning of the global threat to freedom from China’s Communist Party appeared on walls around Hong Kong during the protests of 2019. It was a prescient message, though not for the reasons the spray-painters might have imagined. Five years after the city’s democracy movement was crushed, authoritarianism is rising around the world — but in most cases the threat is coming from within.