Most of the UK challenges appear to come from individuals or small groups, unlike in the US, where 72% of demands to censor books last year were brought forward by organised groups, according to the American Library Association earlier this week.
However, evidence suggests that the work of US action groups is reaching UK libraries too. Alison Hicks, an associate professor in library and information studies at UCL, interviewed 10 UK-based school librarians who had experienced book challenges. One âspoke of finding propaganda from one of these groups left on her deskâ, while another âwas directly targeted by one of these groupsâ. Respondents âalso spoke of being trolled by US pressure groups on social media, for example when responding to free book giveawaysâ.
[âŠ]
Censorship by pupils in UK schools, including âvandalising library material, annotating library books with racist and homophobic slursâ, and damaging posters and displays was identified in Hicksâ study, which she wrote about in the spring issue of the SLAâs journal, The School Librarian. Such censorship âis not something I have seen in the USâ, she said.
The types of books targeted may also differ. âAlmost all the UK attacks reported in my study centred on LGBTQ+ materials, while US attacks appear to target material related to race, ethnicity and social justice as well as LGBTQ+ issues,â said Hicks.
In The Guardian
Librarians in UK increasingly asked to remove books, as influence of US pressure groups spreads
in The GuardianOn 21 April, Germany will deport me â an EU citizen convicted of no crime â for standing with Palestine
in The GuardianIn the first week of January, I received a letter from the Berlin Immigration Office, informing me that I had lost my right of freedom of movement in Germany, due to allegations around my involvement in the pro-Palestine movement. Since Iâm a Polish citizen living in Berlin, I knew that deporting an EU national from another EU country is practically impossible. I contacted a lawyer and, given the lack of substantial legal reasoning behind the order, we filed a lawsuit against it, after which I didnât think much of it.
I later found out that three other people active in the Palestine movement in Berlin, Roberta Murray, Shane OâBrien and Cooper Longbottom, received the same letters. Murray and OâBrien are Irish nationals, Longbottom is American. We understood this as yet another intimidation tactic from the state, which has also violently suppressed protests and arrested activists, and expected a long and dreary but not at all urgent process of fighting our deportation orders.
Then, at the beginning of March, each of our lawyers received on our behalf another letter, declaring that we are to be given until 21 April to voluntarily leave the country or we will be forcibly removed.
The letters cite charges arising from our involvement in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. None of the charges have yet led to a court hearing, yet the deportation letters conclude that we are a threat to public order and national security. There has been no legal process for this decision, and none of us have a criminal record. The reasoning in the letters continues with vague and unfounded accusations of âantisemitismâ and supporting âterrorist organisationsâ â referring to Hamas â as well as its supposed âfront organisations in Germany and Europeâ.
This is not the first instance of Germany weaponising migration law. Since October 2023, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has unlawfully frozen the processing of all asylum seekers from Gaza. And on 16 April 2025 a federal administrative court in Germany will reportedly decide on a case that could set a precedent for the German state to increase deportations of asylum seekers to Greece.
These extreme measures are not a sudden shift or solely a fringe rightwing position. They are the result of a more than year-long campaign by the liberal Ampel coalition â the Social Democratic party (SPD), the Free Democratic party (FDP) and the Greens â and the German media, calling for mass deportations, widely seen as a response to the growing pro-Palestinian movement, and targeted predominantly at the Arab and Muslim German population.
The rise of end times fascism
in The GuardianAlive to our era of genuine existential danger â from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI â but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.
And so we have the Trump administrationâs dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled âASMRâ, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia Universityâs pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: âSHALOM, MAHMOUD.â Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noemâs sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona âŠ).
The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale â to bank on your bunker â is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.
Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature
in The GuardianDemocracy, we are told, allows people a voice in politics. But only, it seems, if they have a few million to give to a political party. As the political scientist Prof Martin Gilens notes in his book Affluence and Influence: âUnder most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesnât adopt.â GDP growth was strong under Joe Biden, but as the economics professor Jason Furman points out: âFrom 2019 to 2023, inflation-adjusted household income fell, and the poverty rate rose.â GDP and social improvement are no longer connected.
All those good things? Sorry, theyâre not for you. If you feel an urge to tear it all down, to burn the whole stinking, hypocritical, exclusive system to the ground, Trump is your man. Or so he claims. In reality his entire performance is both a distraction from and an accelerant of spiralling inequality. He can hardly lose: the more he exacerbates inequality, the more he triggers an urge for revenge against his scapegoats: immigrants, trans people, scientists, teachers, China.
But such killer clowns canât pull this off by themselves. Their most effective recruiters are centrist parties paralysed in the face of economic power. In hock to rich funders, terrified of the billionaire media, for decades they have been unable even to name the problem, let alone address it. Hence the spectacular uselessness of the Democratsâ response to Trump. As the US journalist Hamilton Nolan remarks: âOne party is out to kill, and the other is waiting for its leaders to die.â
Trump is setting the US on a path to educational authoritarianism
in The GuardianOn 14 February, the US Department of Educationâs office of civil rights issued a letter providing notice to American educational institutions, schools and universities of the departmentâs new interpretation of federal civil rights law. The letter lays out new conditions for institutions to receive federal funding, including in the form of student loans or scientific and medical research.
Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in federally assisted programs or activities. The education departmentâs âDear Colleaguesâ letter redefines the central targets of Title VI to centrally include supposed discrimination against whites. The letter was followed, on 28 February, with a set of guidelines for its interpretation. The novel understanding of anti-white discrimination in these documents is a chilling manifestation of educational authoritarianism.
[âŠ]
The guidelines for what would count as a Title VI violation are vague. From the guidelines:
"a racially-oriented vision of social justice, or similar goals will be probative in OCRâs analysis of the facts and circumstances of an individual case."
The most straightforward way to read the letter and the guidelines is as defining âschool-on-student harassmentâ as including Black history. The letter treats teaching large swaths of Black and Indigenous history as akin to a white professor consistently referring to all of their Black students with a terrible racial slur.
The âmore extreme practices at a universityâ that âcould create a hostile environment under Title VIâ include âpressuring them to participate in protests or take certain positions on racially charged issuesâ. But reason, rationality and morality are sources of âpressureâ. How does one distinguish the pressure placed on people by moral arguments for racially charged issues from other kinds of pressure?
The guidelines create a culture of fear and intimidation around history. If one discusses Black history, one immediately risks endorsing the view that the United States âis built upon âsystemic and structural racismââ. The guidelines invite students to report their teachers and their school administrators for not adhering to a state-imposed ideology about history, as well as state-imposed ideology about gender, which threatens to make teaching critically about gender identity, or including trans perspectives, into school-on-student harassment. Failure to adhere to state ideologies about history and gender fits this new definition of âschool-on-student harassmentâ. Billions in federal funding is at stake.
âHe nails it on the first takeâ: how the Beatles helped my autistic son find his voice
in The GuardianSuch a lovely story:
Eventually, Miss Parsons tells us about her departmentâs annual production. Itâs called Oakfieldâs Got Talent, and she wonders whether James might perform? When I ask him, I get a fervent yes; to reduce the chances of anything unexpected happening, she agrees to the suggestion that I should accompany him on an acoustic guitar.
[âŠ]
I reach for a piece of paper that is serving as a cue card, and James reads it out: âThis next song was originally by the Velvet Underground, and itâs calledâ â he then slows down â âIâm. Waiting. For. The. Man.â
When we play it, James sounds like Mark E Smith from the Fall, barking out the words, and rising to the conclusion of each verse â âOh, Iâm waiting for mah manâ â with a loud sense of triumph. A few times, he drifts away from the microphone, and yells the words into the air. We have worked out a procedure for this: I say âMicrophone! Microphone!â out of the side of my mouth, and he returns to the right spot.
I donât know if many of the audience quite understand what they are listening to: a less-than-wholesome song about copping dope in 1960s Manhattan, the grimness of withdrawal, and the rapturous pleasure of yet another hit of heroin. But they like it: we get a second round of applause, and I do that showbiz thing of camply extending my arm in Jamesâs direction. There are a few whoops, and he picks his way down the wooden stairs to the right of us, before taking a seat in the audience.
Ginny and Rosa are there. To us, the meaning of the six minutes James and I have just spent on the stage is pretty obvious. If you are repeatedly told what your child canât do, it starts to eat at you. Certain words hover over you: âsevereâ, âprofoundâ, âimpairmentâ. You miss superlatives; whatever successes your child achieves, they donât tend to feel like the same ones other kids experience. But here is something James can do â brilliantly, fantastically, wonderfully â on the same terms as everyone else. Better still, he loves doing it, and it makes him the centre of attention.
It is a gorgeous summer evening, and everything feels as if it is surrounded by a lovely glow. When we get home, James does not sleep, but I do not mind at all. âI want to do that again,â he says. âI want to do that again!â
Washington Post opinion editor departs as Bezos pushes to promote âpersonal liberties and free marketsâ
in The GuardianShameless.
Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed âhands-offâ owner of the Washington Post, emailed staffers on Wednesday morning about a change he is applying to the paperâs opinion section that appears to align the newspaper more closely with the political right.
âIâm writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,â Bezos said.
âWeâll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the readerâs doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.â
Trump and Musk have launched a new class war. In the UK, we must prepare to defend ourselves
in The GuardianThe massive programme of cuts and deregulation that Musk and Ramaswamy seek extends the sadomasochistic politics now ascendant on both sides of the Atlantic. Demagogues have found that it doesnât matter how much their followers suffer, as long as their designated enemies are suffering more. If you can keep ramping up the pain for scapegoats (primarily immigrants), voters will thank you for it, regardless of their own pain. This is the great discovery of the conflict entrepreneurs, led by Musk himself: what counts in politics is not how well people are doing, but how well they are doing in relation to designated out-groups.
[âŠ]
Why has the class war been unleashed now, not just in the US, but in much of the rest of the world? Because the democratising, distributive effects of two world wars have worn off. We fondly imagine that the semi-democratic era (exemplified in rich nations by the years 1945â1975) is the normal state of politics. But it was highly atypical, and made possible only by the warsâ erosion of the power of the ruling classes. The default state of centralised societies, to which nations are now reverting, is oligarchy.
[âŠ]
In nations that have not yet fully succumbed to oligarchy we need to recognise, and recognise fast, that democratic politics do not emerge spontaneously. Our systems achieve a quasi-democratic character only with an active citizenry, whose engagement is largely defined by protest, and an independent media. But, at the direct behest of capital, governments are criminalising peaceful protest, while many independent media, such as the BBC, shut out dissenting voices.
Steve Bannon says inauguration marks âofficial surrenderâ of tech titans to Trump
in The GuardianBannon said after Zuckerbergâs visit, âthe floodgates opened up and they were all there trying to be supplicants. I look at this, and I think most people in our movement look at this, as President Trump broke the oligarchs. He broke them and they surrendered.â Bannon added, with a laugh: âThey came and said: âOh, weâll take off any constraints, no more checkings, everything.ââ
âI view this as September of 1945, the Missouri, and you have the [Japanese] imperial high command, and heâs like Douglas MacArthur. That is an official surrender, OK, and I think itâs powerfulâ, Bannon added.
The comments come as Joe Biden warned that âan oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracyâ and of âthe dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy peopleâ.
But according to the White House archives, Biden had not uttered the word âoligarchyâ in the context of American politics until last week. Progressive Democrats called out Biden for being an imperfect messenger having courted and relied on big-ticket donors during his 50-year career.
âItâs cowardly that after representing the oligarchs for 50 years in office, he calls out this threat to our nation with just days left in his presidency,â said Nina Turner, a national co-chair for the senator Bernie Sandersâ last presidential campaign.
Major banks are abandoning their climate alliance en masse. So much for âwoke capitalâ
in The GuardianThe NZBA is a voluntary network of global banks committed to âalign lending and investment portfolios with net zero emissions by 2050â. [âŠ] At its height, the coalition boasted 40% of global banking assets. And at the time of its launch, its co-founder, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, described the NZBA as the âbreakthrough in mainstreaming climate finance the world needsâ.
So far a breakthrough remains at large. In evaluating the NZBA, the benchmark that ultimately matters is that of curbing global emissions and fossil fuel expansion. On both of these points, itâs not clear that the alliance has had any effect. Banksâ targets have been met with widespread criticism concerning lack of transparency and inconsistent or questionable methodologies, and recent research shows little to no difference between the financing and engagement impact of NZBA members and non-members. A separate study found banks that self-present as eco-conscious lend more to polluting industries than those that donât. Impressively, there has been an overall uptick in fossil fuel financing since 2021 â after the group was formed.
But this raises a critical question: if these alliances were voluntary, non-binding, and seem to have done close to nothing to hinder banks financing fossil fuel expansion, why are banks bothering to quit?
The answer is always, in finance, a calculus of risk. At the time of NZBAâs founding, banks faced considerable reputational risk for being seen as climate laggards. The wind was in the sails of governments and institutions touting climate action, and banks acted accordingly. Today, on the back of record fossil fuel profitability, a protracted backlash against âwoke capitalâ and the second coming of Trump, the calculus has changed.
[âŠ]
In a statement published on 31 December, GFANZ announced it would drop its requirements for members to publish firm targets, allowing âany financial institution working to mobilise capital and lower the barriers to financing energy transition to participateâ and earlier this month announced it would no longer work as an umbrella organisation, but a stand-alone body working to âmobiliseâ climate finance. For a project that still retains many prominent European banks within its ranks, the crumbling to pressure and change of direction was remarkably swift. More cynically, it might be read as an admission that all these âtargetsâ and âdisclosuresâ never meant much at all.