Welcome to Andy Worthington

Last month, when it was revealed that the MoD was siting surface-to-air missiles on the roofs of residential buildings as part of the bloated security measures for the Olympics — estimated to cost at least £1.4 billion, to be paid for by taxpayers — there was a brief flurry of outrage, although not enough to [...]

Last November, a war crimes tribunal established in Malaysia “found George Bush and Tony Blair guilty of ‘crimes against peace’ and other war crimes for their 2003 aggressive attack on Iraq, as well as fabricating pretexts used to justify the attack,” as Glenn Greenwald explained at the time. The seven-member Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, [...]

Forcing people into jobs they don’t want, just to claim their benefit, might be defensible if there was pretty swiftly a real job available to those who were capable and wanted it, but as the Tory-led government has pushed its workfare scheme, the alarming truth is that it has created a forced working underclass of [...]

There was a point, during yesterday’s Occupy protest in the City of London, with hundreds of people flowing down High Viaduct from Holborn Circus, high above Farringdon Street, and heading towards Newgate Street, Cheapside and the Bank of England, when there was a real power to the message that protestors around the world are sending [...]

The weather couldn’t have been better in London yesterday for the day of action organised as part of the “Global Spring,” an initiative by activists from the Occupy movement, representatives from Take the Square, and other groups in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, who have been planning events worldwide for today and [...]

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January with US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us— just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email. Ever since it became apparent, during [...]

Today, the Occupy movement and allied groups launch a series of actions and occupations on the first anniversary of the launch of the Indignados movement in Spain, which, along with the revolutionary movements in the Middle East — and Tunisia and Egypt in particular — inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began last September [...]

After returning to the streets en masse on May 1, the global Occupy movement will be active in towns and cities worldwide from Saturday May 12 to Tuesday May 15, as the next phase of what Occupy supporters, and those in other allied movements, are calling the “Global Spring.” Below is an introduction to the [...]

On Wednesday, the coalition government delivered a dud Queen’s Speech demonstrating that they have run out of ideas, apart from insisting, like deranged automata, that their inflexibility and lack of vision is actually helpful. In the House of Commons, David Cameron claimed that the Queen’s Speech was “about a government taking the tough, long-term decisions [...]

On Saturday, the eyes of the world were on Guantánamo, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of planning and facilitating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash — appeared in a courtroom for the first time since [...]