John Merrick
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Articles by John Merrick
What Burnham gets wrong about the Eighties Thatcher offered voters a whole new world
Burnham needs to look forward. (Derek Hudson/Getty) Andy BurnhamEric HobsbawmmanchesterismNeoliberalismPoliticsUK Prefer us on Google Neoliberalism has the rather strange distinction of being declared dead for nearly as long as it has been alive. As far back as 1998, Marxism Today, the magazine that had done more than any other to shape the British Left’s ideas about Margaret Thatcher’s crusade, returned with a special one-off issue, seven years after it closed its doors.
Eric Hobsbawm's age of contradictions His vision of emancipation was flawed
Eric Hobsbawm at the Hay festival in 2009. (David Levenson/Getty) CambridgeEric HobsbawmHistoryLabourMarxism Prefer us on Google For most academics, professional success extends to citations and conference invites. Eric Hobsbawm was different. His towering Ages series of books remains among the most celebrated and widely read works of historical scholarship to have been published in this or any era.
Is Burnham too Northern? It’s a long way to Downing Street
Burnham eating breakfast. (Christopher Furlong/Getty) Like many post-industrial constituencies in Northern England — areas with predominantly white, working-class, Brexit-voting populations — received wisdom had Makerfield hurtling towards the Right.
Merrick Brock, PLLC Opens an Office in Lynchburg, Virginia
Merrick Brock, PLLC, a Virginia personal injury law office has opened a new location in Lynchburg to better serve injured clients in Central Virginia. LYNCHBURG, VA, UNITED STATES, June 15, 2026 / EINPresswire.com/ -- Merrick Brock, PLLC, a Virginia personal injury law office in Richmond founded by attorneys John Merrick and Les Brock, has opened a new location in Lynchburg to better serve injured clients in Central Virginia.
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The commune on the moors
The train from Sheffield to Dore & Totley takes only a few minutes. It ambles five miles out of the city as the surrounding greys shade to green. Sheffield is a famously leafy place — often called the greenest city in Europe — but even so, Dore & Totley station comes as a surprise. Two modest platforms and a handsome Victorian station are pressed hard against a densely wooded hillside.
The right wants us to think Britain is on the verge of ethnic conflict. The truth is worse than that
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An Island of Little Landlords
“I bought this house at £50,000,” says James Coupland as Darude’s Eurodance classic, “Sandstorm,” plays loudly in the background, “and I spent £30,000 on the refurb.” Coupland is showing us around his latest “buy-to-let” property, a standard-looking terraced house of the kind you’ll find more or less anywhere in Britain, now outfitted with the gray […] Sorry, but this article is available to subscribers only. Please log in or become a subscriber.
‘Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain’ by Sam Wetherell review
Liverpool, we often hear, is a city apart; ‘Scouse not English’, as the local saying goes. Throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Irish heritage of many Liverpudlians helped forge a civic culture and politics distinct from the rest of the country – so much so that for 44 years one of the city’s constituencies returned the only Irish Nationalist MP on mainland Britain.
Jonathan Bowden Is a Fascist for Our Postliterate Age
Jonathan Bowden, the British far-right writer and activist, was like a figure from a Roberto Bolaño novel. The author of several dozen works of self-published avant-garde fiction that even his fiercest defenders describe as almost entirely unreadable, and the producer and writer of several strange and extremely low-budget horror and fantasy films, Bowden spent decades flitting between various parts of the British far right before his death at the age of forty-nine in 2012.
Why are books so boring now?
If the figures are to be believed, there has never been a better time to be a publisher. In 2022, British publishers sold 669 million physical books, the highest number ever recorded. 2023 was tougher for many, with the post-COVID bump in book sales finally coming to an end. Even so, according to Nielsen BookScan, £92.3 million was spent on books in the week leading up to Christmas alone that year – the highest figure for 16 years. Yet these buoyant numbers can hide more than they reveal.
Why are so many books so boring now?
If the figures are to be believed, there has never been a better time to be a publisher. In 2022, British publishers sold 669 million physical books, the highest number ever recorded. Last year was tougher for many, with the post-Covid bump in book sales finally coming to an end. Even so, according to Nielsen BookScan, in the week up to Christmas alone £92.3 million was spent on books, the highest such figure for 16 years. Yet these buoyant numbers can hide more than they reveal.
Raphael Samuel and People's History
As a way to resurrect this mainly dormant Substack, and to find a way to do something with this piece of writing that otherwise would languish on my hard drive, i’m publishing today the text of a talk i gave to the Socialist History Society on Saturday, 1st June 2024. The society is superb, and it was an honour to present this text to them. There’s a recording of it, along with the response by the great Anna Davin, on their website for anyone who wants to listen.
Do you leave your home town or stay behind? It’s the question at the heart of British politics
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Indianapolis Novelist Dan Wakefield Dies at Age 91
INDIANAPOLIS (WIBC-FM) – Novelist, journalist, and screenwriter Dan Wakefield has died at the age of 91. His best-selling novels, Going All the Way and Starting Over were made into feature films. He eventually wrote the screenplay for Going All the Way, which starred Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz, and Rose McGowan. Wakefield also created the NBC prime time television series James at 15 (1977–78) and was the story editor of the series (1977).
Workshop of the World
A new collection of essays from one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century. ‘ONE OF THE MOST OUTSTANDING, ORIGINAL INTELLECTUALS OF HIS GENERATION’, Stuart Hall, author of The work of the pioneering historian Raphael Samuel opened up new vistas of historical enquiry. He was committed to the idea of people’s history, in which he excavated the ordinary lives of those often overlooked or discarded by other writers.
To the Edge | The Point Magazine
On sunny weekends throughout my childhood, my father, ever eager to escape work for a few hours, would drive our family to the nearby village of Alderley Edge to go walking. Set in the picturesque countryside of north Cheshire, the village lies at the base of a thickly wooded sandstone escarpment of the same name that rises over the large, flat Cheshire plain, a mainly rural area that forms the border between England’s West Midlands and its industrial North.
England’s North Has Been Crushed by Thatcherism and Austerity
In 1949, on a ship somewhere in the Indian Ocean, Donald Horne, the iconoclastic Australian writer and critic, was catching up on back issues of the Economist. As he flicked through the pages of that famous organ of Manchester liberalism, skipping past articles on the dividends of Smith’s Potato Chips and the international balance of payments, he learned that the country he was to call home for the next half-decade was one wracked by endless crisis.
England’s North Has Been Crushed by Thatcherism and Austerity
The postwar years were for Niven ones of “bold egalitarian strides” when, driven by a “rare sense of optimism and renewal,” experiments in modern civic culture sprung up across the North. He presents T. Dan Smith, the modernizing leader of Newcastle City Council with his ultimately doomed attempt to turn his home city into the “Brasilia of the North,” as typifying these progressive social democratic dreams.
Man with facial deformity who nicknamed nose John Merrick can "rejoin human race" after op
” The operation, using the only surgical-grade lasers in Scotland, reduced Ian’s nose to normal size.Using a CO2 laser, he removed excess skin tissue from Ian’s nose in what the patient described as “like stripping layers of wallpaper”.With his new-found freedom, Ian now intends to embark on some remarkable and challenging motorcycle odysseys, the first in October to Morocco, Mauretania, Senegal and into war-torn Mali.” Top news stories today Paedophile has jail term doubled Mum tells of...
Britain’s Third King Charles Should Be Its Last
From 1642, England’s King and Parliament were at war with each other. The English revolution of these years culminated in the trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649, after which the Stuart monarchy was replaced by a Commonwealth. Leadership of the Parliamentary camp lay with figures such as Oliver Cromwell, who wanted to preserve oligarchic rule. However, the struggle against Charles Stuart also created an opening for more radical ideas about a truly democratic and egalitarian society.
Queen Elizabeth II’s Reign Glamorized Britain’s Political Backwardness
Her early years were cloistered, and her education insured, either by accident or by design, that she was uncommonly well qualified to be a royal figurehead. She never went to school nor to university: private tutors trained her in history and constitutional law.
Orbán Hymns
Pulling at the frayed edges of Hungarian soft power, one recently deceased conservative philosopher at a time. At the start of last year I began to notice an odd addition to the shelves of my local newsagent. In among the glossy lifestyle mags was a heavyweight new periodical.
John Merrick, Errant History — Sidecar
Hamid Ismailov is widely regarded as one of Central Asia’s greatest living writers. His work has been translated into all the major European languages, including Russian, French, German, Turkish, English and Spanish. Yet in Ismailov’s home country of Uzbekistan his books are outlawed, and since being forced into exile in 1992 for what he has described as his ‘unacceptable democratic tendencies’, he has only been able to return there on rare occasions.
From Italian Factories to British Pizzerias
Review of Down and Out in England and Italy by Alberto Prunetti (Scribe, 2021) When the working class writes, it writes of return. The prodigal child heads home only to find that everything has changed — they have changed. The experience of a new world beyond the confines of their former life has caused a rupture between what was and what is now. Most often, this change comes in the form of education.
Realism’s Revenge
The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons by Carolyn Lesjak[*]. Stanford University Press, 256 pages. Inventing a quote from a seventeenth-century historian in The Red and the Black, Stendhal proclaims the novel “a mirror you take for a walk down the road.” If this is the case, he says, and if the world is immoral, as Stendhal also tells us, then anyone who accuses the novelist of immorality is missing the point.
"Nobody knows more about running this country than me": James Boggs and the racial politics of automation
By John Merrick 10 May 2021 In 1991, a 72-year-old former auto worker stood in front of a class of students at the University of Michigan and declared that “nobody knows more about running this country than me.” A nervous laughter broke out among the students in attendance. What, after all, could this old man mean? Was this hubris – the massively inflated arrogance of age – or something else?
Stop Painting Northern England as a Land of Reactionary Proles
Barely a year since Labour’s so-called “red wall” of ex-industrial seats crumbled in the December 2019 general election, the North of England is again center stage.
Stop Trying to Make Us Worship the Royals
It is the happy fate of the British royal family to live on long past the announcements of its inevitable demise. Were this institution to have died each time its obituary had been written, I’d be sending this from a republic many times over.
The Health Care Crucible
The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant. Harvard University Press, 368 pages. Before the decisive shifts of the late 1970s and early 1980s reconstituted the economies of the Global North, politics turned on the management of labor and capital.
Switching off: on wageless life
The past month has been the least productive of my life. I have read a little, and written a bit — I spent at least a week wasting time online, clicking randomly onto whatever sparked my interest at that particular moment. If it’s not obvious what’s going on, then I should probably clarify: I’m out of work. In fact, for the first time since I left high school, I have spent more than a month without any meaningful employment. It’s been a strange experience.
Digging where we stand: talking about our labour
We spend the majority of our waking lives at work. Yet we rarely speak about work itself—that is, the actual tasks we carry out—whether we’re making pizzas, cleaning hotel rooms, fixing cars, or even writing essays. Of course, we often hear talk of ‘work’; about the nature of employment, changes in the workplace, or who works and why. We have all heard stories about the coming age of automation, the rise of novel forms of service work and precarious labour, or the birth of the ‘new world of work’.
Michael Apted’s Up, a Decades-Long Film on Britain’s Class System
The Up series of TV films — the first of which was aired in May 1964, with the most recent coming fifty-five years later in June 2019 — is certainly the longest-running documentary series of all time. Yet it was only by chance that it came to be. The first episode, made up of interviews with fourteen seven-year-old children from across British society about their lives and future prospects, was intended as a single stand-alone episode for the current affairs show World in Motion.
The Angel of History
Image: Flickr Pestilence and plague have often prompted waves of apocalyptic thinking, calling into question the steady march of progress in human history. In 1498, in a period of intense apocalyptic speculation, the German artist Albrecht Dürer published a series of fifteen woodcuts depicting the Book of Revelation. Simultaneously Gothic, Baroque, and Renaissance, seeming to span not just styles but centuries, the work condenses the most abstract and elusive book of the New Testament.
Mike Davis Tried to Warn Us About a Virus-Induced Apocalypse
Review of Mike Davis, The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (OR Books, 2020). Mike Davis has good claim to being the most important Marxist historian of the past fifty years. While his work may not have the vast geographical or temporal scope of Perry Anderson, Ellen Meiksins Wood, or Robert Brenner, nor has it mined a particular period or subject with the focus of a figure like E. P.
Charlotte, NC Artists Put A New Spin on #BLM Street Murals
Photos from King Zeek via Facebook (CC BY 2.0) When D.C. Mayor Bowser renamed two blocks “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and painted the words on the street, she single-handedly inspired a movement. In Charlotte, North Carolina, artists there put a new, stunning spin on Black Lives Matter street murals.
A Tale of Two Messages
Jun 3, 2020 9 Min read time University administrators must be held accountable for their decisions to reopen campuses. Image: Sample Gates on the campus of Indiana University Bloomington On May 26 the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 exceeded 100,000, including 2,000 deaths in the state of Indiana alone.
Histories of violence
I must have been nine or ten when it happened. It was getting dark, the low light fading across the fields, barely enough to illuminate the playground. My memory now is fuzzy, I haven’t been back to the area for nearly two decades, and the vast expanse of grass surrounding us must be a childish exaggeration. But I remember the cat, a dappled ginger and white tabby, coming close to us inquisitively.
Engineering success for OSDs and ISDs
By John Merrick, Senior Technical Director, Arcadis Good engineering design ensures over-station and integrated station developments are sustainable, people-focused and financially feasible. Prudent engineering choices not only manage risk and maximise functionality, they increase return on investment.
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