Supermarkets dominate shopping in the advanced world. We buy most of our food in them and a significant proportion of other goods. This blog is about how the giant supermarket chains compete and wh…| Mike Haynes - The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
1 post published by thejobbingleftiehistorianandresearcher during October 2025| Mike Haynes - The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
At first glance the world looks a more democratic place. In 1950 T.H.Marshall defined democratic citizenship as having – civil rights (freedom of speech, thought, religion, the right to o…| Mike Haynes - The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
I recall reading, maybe 20 years ago, someone saying wait till the 60s generation gets old. Well we are old now (I am one) and we seem as a group to pretty much like the Tories in the UK. In 2019 r…| Mike Haynes - The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
For many environmentalists and socialists the world is in a mess because of the ‘capitalocene’. It was capitalism that started it, it is capitalism that drives it and ending capitalism will solve it. I don’t think it is that simple. This story underestimates the impacts humans had on the planet before capitalism and it misunderstands how […]| Mike Haynes – The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
Nearly 50 years ago Eric Hobsbawm published an infamous essay on ‘the Forward March of Labour Halted’. Hobsbawm grasped the retreat that was beginning to take place – a retreat that in some respects would turn into a rout. There was a vitriolic response from much of the left. But many of their criticisms now look silly. Hobsbawm’s argument had a […]| Mike Haynes – The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
All over the world the human population is aging. Birthrates are falling. They are below replacement levels in some rich societies. And life expectancy is increasing almost ev…| Mike Haynes - The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
Disillusion with conventional politics is widespread in most countries including the UK. Few people, however, were prepared for the size of the response when Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn announced in the late spring of 2025 that they were going to create a new left party. With days hundreds of thousands had signed up to a […]| Mike Haynes – The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
Mass political parties developed in the second half of the nineteenth century as the right to vote was extended. Earlier political parties were loose coalitions at the top. Now they needed to deve…| Mike Haynes - The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
Prices change all the time. They change for two reasons. They change against one another – what are called relative price changes. And they change on average. If prices rise on average we have inflation. If they fall on average we have deflation. Since 1945 we have lived in an inflationary era but before then, for […]| Mike Haynes – The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
The aim of this blog is to set out the different elements that allow us to understand how secure or vulnerable people are in the labour market – especially in the UK. 1. The Labour Force Participation Rate The labour force participation rate is the ratio of the total labour force to the total working-age population. The working age […]| Mike Haynes – The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
I have borrowed this idea from Danny Dorling (in his Shattered Nation, 2023) and used the easily accessible data on the Our World in Data website to show how the UK has fallen in the global health …| Mike Haynes - The Jobbing Leftie Historian and Researcher
